Marc Turnage

Author, Historian of Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins, Teacher, Traveler, CEO Biblical Expeditions. Podcast: @theWITBpodcast

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Stop letting academic elitism overrule the reality of people's lives.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is, as the Jews say, their whole Torah. All the rest is commentary.

The Jews of Israel are Algerie Francaise -- and will be defeated in the same way.

Alas, it is only when they begin to ask whether in some vital ways we might be different from Algerie Francaise -- differences that make us a bit "stickier," a bit harder to remove -- that their movement will finally transform from a campaign of never-ending brutality and self-destruction into a movement for actual real-world liberation.

They could begin that shift right here in this historical analogy they love so much. They could notice that for the majority of the 132 years that France ruled Algeria, Algerians scarcely thought of themselves as Algerians. They only organized a resistance movement in 1954 -- 124 years into French colonial rule. And once their resistance was underway, the French were gone in eight short years. A million white French Europeans literally got on boats and left.

The Palestinian effort, meanwhile, has had a rather different trajectory. If we set its beginning in the 1964 founding of the PLO, which was modeled in many ways on the Algerian FLN, it's been going for 62 years. If we date it to the Arab Revolt or the 1920 riots, it's been going for even longer: 90 years and 106 years respectively.

All of which suggests that the Algeria analogy probably offers stronger evidence that we're *not* French Algeria than that we are. Something isn't working like the analogy suggests it should.

What if -- forgive the length, dear reader, I'm coming to the point -- we're not really French colonialists, no matter how much they insist we are? What if we're something altogether more real and rooted and desperate and grimly determined to cling to our land, a trait Palestinians celebrate in themselves as "sumud" and assume we Jews can't possibly possess the same?

What if we're exactly what we think we are: a long-suffering people who arrived here as desperate refugees fresh out of any other options, and who found and built a home here after millennia of brutal and vulnerable wandering? What if the demand that we be erased from this place amounts to a demand that we be erased from the world -- and thus closes our ranks, unifies us and mobilizes us to action? What if the PLO/Hamas narratives about the inevitability of our destruction have done more harm to the cause of Palestine than to the existence of Israel?

What if their refusal to seriously learn our historical experience and culture and identity -- understanding us feels to them like legitimizing us; it is so taboo in their culture that Palestinian scholars face literal violence for teaching our history -- what if this purposeful ignorance makes it vastly more likely that they will fail in their effort to destroy us?

So what if, in the end, like it or not, the only viable path to Palestinian liberation lies in accepting that we're not going anywhere, and thus ending the forever war and sending the ball -- the question of Palestinian freedom -- squarely back into our court?

What then?

Anyway, back to the great war against sunburned French colonialists...any minute now we'll all be taking those boats to, erm, wherever our France might be...

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Obviously true to any student of history

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Many people are saying.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

For those who haven't been following -- and nobody's been following because nobody cares, least of all the journalists' NGOs -- Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been steadily releasing death notifications for one "journalist" after another, listing them invariably as fighters and commanders in the organizations' ranks.

It's dozens now. Maybe more.

But the "Israel targets journalists" meme is forever. The facts will never penetrate the thick fog of ideological confirmation bias that has overtaken the NGO and activism world and its journalistic arms in the mainstream media.

Literally no one cares about whether journalists were actually hunted down by Israel, as it was depicted by @pressfreedom and others, or whether Hamas used fake "journalist" claims to protect combatant commanders, counting on a global NGO and media ecosystem it knew was looking to confirm its biases.

No one will examine these falsehoods or report on them in a visible way because no one cares about the wellbeing of the real journalists, who are desperately endangered when combatant commanders are labeled "journalists" -- and even the world's major journalist advocacy groups decide to play along.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)

— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.

— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”

— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.

— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.

— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.

— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation:

If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Never give up

[Making Sense Podcast @MakingSenseHQ]

There Was No Famine in Gaza

[Hussain Abdul-Hussain @hahussain]

At this rate, U.S. Congress will look like the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shura Council by 2030

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

The Pope rightly warns that AI must serve human dignity, not become a tool of domination or exclusion.

But if we hand governments sweeping power over AI development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens — as Orwell foretold in 1984?

This is the real alignment problem.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.” Who will guard the guardians?

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The oldest questions of human nature and authority don’t disappear in the AI age. They become newly relevant.

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

Weekend reading by the always excellent @HusseinAboubak on Palestine as a word-symbol and the entire system built around it.

Yesterday, in my talk in Baltimore, I read out this following paragraph that is towards the end of the piece, because it is the one that matters most - that the entire Palestine system rests on the human desire and choice to avoid responsibility and blame others for one's misfortune.

"The entire system—the billions of dollars, the media empires, the proxy armies, the diplomatic maneuvering, the academic industries, the human rights apparatus, the regional competitions that shape the fate of nations—rests, at the last, on something so small that it is almost invisible: a man sitting before a television or a radio, choosing to feel righteous instead of choosing to be honest, and finding in that choice the only dignity available to him in a world that has stripped him of every other kind. He is the foundation of the Palestine system. He is its most exploited victim. He is its most essential participant. And he will not leave, because the system, for all the misery it produces in him and through him, is the only place in the modern world where his suffering means anything at all."

And if there is a civilizational battle where Zionism and Palestinianism stand for core human struggles, at its core, I see it as this:

Zionism stands for responsibility, human agency, the merging of vision and action, the spirit that says that even if we are dealt some of the worst cards in history, we take collective and individual action to change our lives. It is, by definition of historical action, messy, but it is life.

Palestinianism stands for infantile rejection of responsibility, the righteous comfort in blaming others for one's misfortune, the elevation of perennial victimhood over action in history. It is therefore no coincidence that an age that revels in victimhood is elevating Palestinianism. It is the reason my pinned tweet is that "Zionism is a progressive cause that had the misfortune of success".

(P.S. And what I find alarming is that domestically in Israel quite a bit of our so called leadership in Israel and some of their supporters have been infected by Palestinianism as a worldview that blames others for one's misfortune and prefers to destroy for others rather than build for oneself).

https://t.co/ZMJqLuVeIC

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

Brilliant! Sam Harris eviscerates the morally confused and the challenged, who believe there is genocide in Gaza.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

100% there is no genocide in Gaza. No eradication project. People confused about what the word means is culturally appalling and dangerous for the future of western society. The confusion has indeed been engineered by people know what they are doing. No genocide does not mean simply too much death and destruction in war. It is about intent and action to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Sam Harris @MakingSenseHQ is spot on.

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

What I will describe below is Palestine, not as a place, idea, or cause, but as one of the world’s largest systems of political and economic extraction. The word system is overworked, and I use it with some reluctance, but no other word in the available vocabulary captures what I mean. I do not mean a conspiracy, because there is actually no one conspiring. I do not mean a structure in the strong Marxist sense, because there is no base from which the rest is derived, and there is no priority or point of origin. I do not mean an institution, because the arrangement crosses every institutional boundary that modern political life recognizes.

I mean an autopoietic system; decentralized, self-generating, and closed. It is a self-reproducing pattern of extraction that operates simultaneously across multiple independent domains—spiritual, ideological, institutional, geopolitical, economic, and local—each running on its own logic and its own incentive structure, none reducible to the others, and all converging to produce a stable aggregate that no participant designed and no participant can dissolve. The pattern that makes up the system, and which is condensed in the Palestinian word-symbol, has no center. It has no origin point. It has no master node whose removal would collapse the whole. It has no class of beneficiaries who could be deprived of their benefits to restore justice, and it has no class of victims who could be liberated to end the system, because in this system every participant is simultaneously a victim and a beneficiary, a captive and an extractor, a sufferer and a profiteer. The fusion is precisely the condition of participation.

Before describing the system, one must describe the currency in which the system trades in order to grasp why the system has the shape it has. The currency of the Palestine system is the suffering of Palestinians indexed to the presence of Jews. This phrase is awkward, and I will refine it as we proceed. The currency is not Palestinian suffering as such, because there have been many Palestinian sufferings—at the hands of other Arabs, other Palestinians, Hamas, etc.—that have generated no markets, no movements, no symbolic capital, no extractive industry. The currency is not Jewish presence as such either, because Jewish populations exist in many places without generating the political-economic-symbolic complex that surrounds Israel. The currency is the conjunction: the suffering of one people at a site where the other people are politically and territorially present. That conjunction, and only that conjunction, produces the symbolic substance that the entire system mines.

Link to full essay below

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Aujourd'hui je déconstruis la déconstruction.

La déconstruction est le virus mental le plus efficace jamais conçu contre une civilisation. Il a été fabriqué en France entre 1966 et 1980 par trois hommes : Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Il a été exporté aux États-Unis, hybridé avec le puritanisme racial américain, et il est revenu trente ans plus tard sous le nom de wokisme paralyser l'Occident entier. Voici comment il fonctionne, et pourquoi il faut le détruire.

La thèse est simple. Toute vérité n'est qu'un rapport de pouvoir déguisé. Tout texte sacré, toute loi, toute science, toute norme, toute hiérarchie, toute identité, toute institution cache en réalité une domination. Déconstruire, c'est montrer le rapport de force sous le vernis du vrai. C'est arracher le masque. C'est "démasquer".

Formulé comme ça, ça paraît inoffensif. Voire utile. Qui n'aime pas un peu d'esprit critique ? Le piège est là. La déconstruction se présente comme une méthode. Elle est en réalité une ontologie. Elle ne dit pas seulement "interrogeons les normes", elle dit "il n'y a *que* des rapports de pouvoir". La différence est civilisationnelle.

Une société qui interroge ses normes reste debout. Une société qui croit que ses normes ne sont *rien d'autre* que de la domination s'effondre. Parce qu'elle ne peut plus rien défendre. Plus une frontière, plus une loi, plus une science, plus une langue, plus une histoire, plus une biologie, plus une famille. Tout devient suspect. Tout devient négociable. Tout devient "construit donc déconstructible".

C'est la première raison pour laquelle c'est un virus. Il s'auto-réplique. Une fois inoculé, il transforme tout ce qu'il touche en cible. La science est patriarcale, donc déconstruisons-la. Le langage est colonial, donc réinventons-le. La méritocratie est raciste, donc abolissons-la. Le sexe est une construction, donc choisissons-le. Il n'y a plus de roc. Tout est sable.

Deuxième raison. Le virus est *non-falsifiable*. Si vous défendez une norme, c'est que vous êtes l'oppresseur. Si vous niez être oppresseur, c'est la preuve de votre privilège inconscient. Si vous citez des faits, vos faits sont contaminés par le pouvoir qui les a produits. Si vous citez la raison, la raison elle-même est blanche, masculine, occidentale. Il n'y a aucune sortie possible. Le système est conçu pour rendre toute objection irrecevable par définition.

C'est exactement la structure d'une secte. Et c'est exactement ce qui s'est installé dans les universités, les RH, les médias, les administrations, les conseils d'administration depuis vingt ans.

Troisième raison. Le virus s'auto-réfute mais ne s'auto-détruit pas. Si toute vérité est pouvoir, alors la phrase "toute vérité est pouvoir" est elle-même du pouvoir, donc sans valeur. Logiquement, la déconstruction se mord la queue dès la première phrase. Mais elle s'en moque. Parce qu'elle n'a jamais cherché la cohérence. Elle cherche l'efficacité politique. Et son efficacité politique est immense. Elle désarme ses ennemis et arme ses militants. Elle paralyse le défenseur et libère l'attaquant. C'est une arme asymétrique parfaite.

Quatrième raison. Le virus produit des humains diminués. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Elle sait soupçonner, jamais admirer. Elle voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part. Elle peut produire mille pages sur le caractère opprimant de Shakespeare et zéro ligne qui vaille la peine d'être lue dans cent ans. Elle a confondu l'intelligence critique avec la pose critique. Elle est stérile par construction. Un esprit nourri à la déconstruction est un esprit qui ne sait plus rien édifier.

Cinquième raison, la plus grave. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers. La croyance qu'une vérité est accessible à la raison. La croyance qu'un bien se distingue d'un mal. La croyance qu'un héritage mérite d'être transmis. La déconstruction a méthodiquement dynamité les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui avait nourri ses prophètes. Mais le résultat est là. Une civilisation qui ne croit plus en sa vérité, ni en son bien, ni en son héritage ne se défend pas. Elle s'excuse en attendant la fin.

Voilà ce qu'on a fait. Voilà ce qu'il faut nommer.

La bonne nouvelle, c'est qu'un virus mental ne survit que tant qu'on lui cède l'autorité du discours. Il meurt dès qu'on cesse de jouer son jeu. Dès qu'on réaffirme tranquillement qu'il existe une vérité, un beau, un bien, un héritage. Dès qu'on cesse de demander la permission aux déconstructeurs pour bâtir. Dès qu'on refait. Dès qu'on transmet. Dès qu'on crée.

Les bâtisseurs ont toujours le dernier mot sur les commentateurs. Toujours. Parce qu'à la fin il reste ce qui est construit, et rien de ce qui a été déconstruit.

Alors aujourd'hui je déconstruis la déconstruction. Et demain je construis.

[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm:

https://t.co/CIQbP24i6v

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

"Ongoing" - One of the phrases increasingly used next to the term "Nakba" is "Ongoing" as in the recent proposal by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Now westerners assume that the "ongoing" seeks to highlight continued suffering of Palestinian Arabs, but as with so many other phrases that serve as "dual use language" (as Eran Shayshon coined) is that the deep meaning is very different.

Once it is known and understood that the real time meaning of the Nakba, as described by Constantin Zureiq as "Seven Arab states declare war in an attempt to subdue Zionism, stop impotent before it, and return on their heels" was the shameful failure to defeat the lowly Jews in war - it becomes crystal clear why it remains "ongoing":

As long as Israel exists, the Arab, and especially Palestinian Arab shameful failure to dismantle Jewish sovereignty and "subdue Zionism" remains "ongoing". As long as, per Bevin's quote, the top goal of the Palestine Arabs "to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land" remains unfulfilled, their definition of disaster remains "ongoing".

In the updated book of The War of Return, "October Return", @Adi_Schwartz and I included a dictionary of sort to explore this dual use language. I share it here with you:

"This becomes especially clear when analyzing the language of Palestinian identity and that of its supporters around the world. Terms such as “two states,” “justice,” “return,” and “rights” carry one meaning in dialogue between Palestinians and Westerners or Israelis—but an entirely different meaning within internal Palestinian discourse.

"Take “two states,” for example. During the years of negotiations, Palestinian leaders—and many surveys—expressed support for the “two-state solution.” Israelis and Westerners reasonably assumed that this meant one state for Palestinian Arabs and one for Jews. In retrospect, we should have checked. For when Palestinians speak of “two states,” they also maintain that millions of Palestinian “refugees” have a right to settle inside Israel. The implication is that the phrase “two states” actually means a Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside a second Arab-majority state that replaces Israel via the mass return of refugees. In effect: “this one is ours, and that one is also ours.”

"To this day, no official Palestinian peace plan includes the recognition of a Jewish state on any part of the land between the river and the sea.

"It is also worth examining the meaning of a word like “justice”—so frequently invoked in phrases like “a just peace,” “a just solution,” or in the names of organizations such as “Students for Justice in Palestine.” To many in the world, “justice” may simply mean that Palestinians should have a state of their own, or that Israel should not control their daily lives. That is a reasonable interpretation. But it is not the Palestinian one.

"For Palestinians, there is only one concept of justice: the reversal of the injustice they associate with the creation of the State of Israel. And central to that “corrective justice” is return—which, by definition, entails the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

"The same applies to words like “rights,” “liberation,” and, of course, “return.” As will become clear in the pages ahead, there is no ambiguity: “return” is the concept that embodies victory over the Jewish state and its elimination.

"That is why the butcherty of October 7 was greeted with euphoria."

[Hussein Aboubakr Mansour @HusseinAboubak]

The trouble with a formal education is that it frequently leaves people too educated to have any real sight and too aware of their over-education to even consider they might actually be blind, leaving their brilliance capable of little more than learned demonstrations of sophisticated blindness and acquired ignorance.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

In my Saturday column for @RestoringWest, I discuss the SPLC’s unraveling, immigration and cultural confidence in the West, and why even after years of smears, I still believe truth ultimately prevails.