Helping Musk, Bezos, Tolkien, Disney (Walt), Marley, Stan Lee, Mandela... to make this planet (and others) a better place to live. But they don't know yet. 😎
Playing charades with the Tesla Optimus robot last night. This is either the single greatest robotics and LLM demo the world has ever seen, or it's MOSTLY remote operated by a human. No in between.
Esta madrugada, trasladamos a más de 2,000 pandilleros desde los penales de Izalco, Ciudad Barrios y San Vicente, hacia el CECOT.
Ahí pagarán por los crímenes cometidos contra nuestro pueblo; incomunicados con el exterior, sin posibilidad de salir, ni de ordenar crímenes desde la cárcel 🇸🇻
This conflict weighs so heavily on me. I have Jewish friends and I have Muslim friends. I have a deep affinity for Israel and for Arab culture, and do a lot of work in the Middle East.
But let’s be clear about some things. Anti-Israel + Pro-Palestine demonstrations erupted around the world *before* Israel responded.
BEFORE.
Let's recap that sequence of events.
1. Palestinian militants wake up in the morning and decide to go and murder Israeli civilians, take hostages, and declare their intent to destroy Israel
2. Demonstrations erupt around the world supporting Palestine and condemning Israel
3. Israel responds to this threat
Go back over it again in case there is any ambiguity.
There is no moral grey area to inhabit here. No fog of war that one can hide behind.
Palestinian militants murdered civilians. In cold blood. They raped Israeli women. They set children on fire and beheaded them. Grandmothers were raped so brutally their pelvis was broken. A pregnant woman had her baby cut out of her stomach and beheaded, only to then suffer beheading herself. Palestinian militants murdered Jews, on a mass scale, in the most barbaric and heinous ways possible. And then vowed that they would keep going, to the thunderous applause of their sympathisers living in the West.
Members of our intelligentsia and elite students openly cheered Hamas, laying the blame *entirely* at the feet of Israeli policy. They justified the most barbaric atrocities under the banner of liberation and decolonization.
If you can't see the problem with that, I don't know what else to tell you.
It is easier of course to just keep quiet, to not talk about it. But I am compelled to.
Because 90 years ago, no one spoke up.
Yet.
It is important to recognize that this is war, and in this war, there are people are dying on both sides - children, women, civilians.
Many people have been trying to build bridges to bring about peace – and all their work crumbled just like that. The world before Oct 7 was a different world. Peace in the Middle East was achievable and now, we’re back to reliving ancient hatreds between the sons of Abraham.
One of the problems with discourse today isn’t just about the things we say; sometimes it’s about the things we don’t say.
Even when we think that “our side” may have not been totally right, we hold back from criticizing because we fear weakening the moral standing of “our side.”
So on one side, they cannot criticise Hamas, and on the other, they cannot criticise the Israeli government / IDF. But Hamas isn’t Palestine, and the Israeli government isn’t Israelis / Jews.
This distinction is important. And for those who say “but Palestinians support Hamas overwhelmingly,” please ask yourself exactly what choice you would have if you were born into the same cultural and social milieu?
You’ve heard the phrase the “bigotry of low expectations.” Sometimes it is compassionate to expect less.
Moral clarity is important, but so is being compassionate and not giving up on humanity.
When will we beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks? When will we no longer take up sword against each other, nor train for war anymore?
I recall the words of Rudyard Kipling:
“What profit to kill men?”
“Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now slain; it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”