@jaddeyekabir@emilykschrader The Palestinian half is Jordan. It’s the Jew’s ancestral land first. The Arabs conquered it. They built their mosque on top of the jewish temple.
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali Gets Confronted on Islamophobia - Her Answer Takes the
Debate in a Completely Different Direction”
Student : You speak of Islamophobia and classes like Black Studies as phony,
ideologically driven things. But what makes white supremacy or Islamophobia different from antisemitism?
America imported millions of African slaves, Native Americans faced forced marches and genocide, and Muslims are being massacred in China today.
So what makes antisemitism so different?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Two things.
First, America and Western Europe have reckoned with their past.
We had slavery, we fought a war and ended it. We had segregation, we fought another major battle and ended it. We had the Civil Rights Movement.
And the people leading many of those emancipation movements were Christians inspired by the Bible.
Second, antisemitism is the oldest hatred in humanity, and you find it across the entire world.
What made the West different was that after nearly exterminating its Jewish population, it looked honestly in the mirror and confronted what it had done.
Islamophobia is a made-up word.
It's been created by a political movement that wants to exploit Western guilt to achieve its ultimate goal: the revival of the caliphate.
And the goal of that movement is to convert people to Islam whether they want to or not.
Those who refuse, she says, could face violence.
That's part of what I mean by subversion, active measures and asymmetric warfare.
The Islamists have become incredibly successful against nations with enormous military and economic power.
Islam is spreading.
They've regained Afghanistan. They have Iraq. They have Syria.
And Muslim governments themselves are afraid of what the Islamist movement could do to them.
They're exploiting principles like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association.
We need to understand that and find a way to preserve our principles while beating the Islamists at their own game.
Student : Is there room for compromise between principles?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: If I want to kill you and behead you unless you convert to the religion I dictate, what would be the place of compromise?
Student : I wouldn't mind converting, since I'm agnostic, but I understand some people wouldn't share that vision...
Orthodox Jews don’t think God is stupid. They believe the Oral Law (Talmud) was also given by God. The eruv is a mechanism the Sages set up within that system (see Tractate Eruvin) to correctly apply the domain laws of Shabbat. Using it is considered fulfilling the rules as they were given, not dodging them.
Dear Bill Maher,
I am waiting for your apology for you yelling at me on your podcast about the Jan 6th “Insurrection” that turns out to be an inside job WITH 26 @FBI CONFIDENCIAL HUMAN SOURCES…
"Under my administration a once feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they're now being run by a gay dictator facing internal division. But I wish Bari Weiss the best at CBS news." LMAO!
Some observations on Kimi:
1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.
2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.
3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.
@chiefkittenme They might not use that one month of Claude. They might forget about it. If they forget about the BTC for a while, that’s not a bad thing.
We're opening the waitlist for our Monetization Gateway, which will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol. https://t.co/pvICtEIixj