Talia

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

AI is going to make a lot of people more sociopathic... but it's particularly troubling to consider how many men are likely using it to justify misogynistic and abusive behaviour in their relationships.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Famously (there is a beautiful Works in Progress piece on this) in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton told an audience in Toronto that medical schools should stop training radiologists, since AI would soon outperform them at reading scans. Ten years later, there are more radiologists than ever, and they earn more than they did then.

Hinton was right about the task, but he was wrong (so far!) on the future of the radiology profession. Times have never been better for them. The gap between those two claims, the difference between tasks and jobs, is the subject of a paper I have written with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, and that we release today: "Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries." (Very relatedly we are also finishing the first draft of our book "Messy Jobs" on AI and Jobs!! You will be the first to hear).

We start from the observation that the growing literature on AI and labor markets measures the AI shock by task exposure: people count how many tasks AI can perform in a given occupation AI can perform, and infer that more exposure means more displacement. Eloundou et al. published a paper in Science in 2024 that started this literature, and many follow the same logic. The inference they make is that the more exposed tasks, the worse the outcomes.

This is incomplete, because labor markets price jobs, not tasks. A radiologist does not just sell image classification, but does many other jobs: triages cases, communicates with other physicians, trains residents, makes the difficult decisions, and signs a diagnosis. The market buys a bundled service. The question AI poses is not whether it can do one task inside the bundle. The question is whether that task can be pulled out.

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https://t.co/wEYMfjGbeX

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

In all seriousness, this is quite a revealing conversation from the perspective of world-systems theory. Macron is appealing to Trump by saying "hey were are both part of the imperial core, let's focus on our shared objective of subordinating the periphery". What he fails to understand, or just doesn't want to acknowledge, is that there is a hierarchy within the imperial core itself.

The US is the main imperial power and seeks to shape the rest of the core, including Western Europe, in its own interests. This has historically included interfering in European elections and even drafting plans for invasions. The US will not blink at the prospect of invading European territory in order to advance its geopolitical power.

Macron is foolish if he believes he can appeal to core-core solidarity, because from the perspective of the US no such thing exists. The correct approach is for Europe to break from the US and chart a more independent path.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

"We will not bend the knee to those who say a Palestinian or a Lebanese life is somehow less worthy, or less equal, to an Israeli or American life."

My speech at the @DAWNmenaorg dinner in DC, accepting their annual Integrity award.
Watch/share/subscribe:
https://t.co/SyJd2TiF6V

[Aashis Joshi @aashisjo]

I call upon Global South scholars & researchers to reconsider our presence in Western academia.

By now it is abundantly clear that Western nations & institutions incl. universities are fully committed to maintaining their colonialist domination over the world, at any cost.

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[H. @pseudowitch6]

Just watched Heeramandi. Found everything but heermandi in it.

I mean either you don’t set your story in 1940’s Lahore, or if you do- you don’t set it in Agra’s landscape, Delhi’s Urdu, Lakhnavi dresses and 1840’s vibe. My not-so-sorry Lahori self can’t really let it go.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the "Cold War" was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.

This remains the primary objective of Western aggression today. And it is the single greatest source of violence, war and instability in the world system.

The reason Western powers went after socialist movements across the global South during the "Cold War" (Cuba, China, the incineration of Vietnam and North Korea, etc) was because they knew socialism would enable the South to regain control over their own productive capacities - their labour and resources and factories - and organize them around local needs and national development.

When this happens - when people in the global South start producing and consuming for themselves - it means that those resources are no longer cheaply available to service consumption and accumulation in the core, thus disrupting the imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labour, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap). Remember, roughly 50% of all material consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the global South. This is what they are trying to defend.

But it wasn't only socialist governments that pursued economic sovereignty. After political decolonization, a wide range of movements and states across the South also sought economic liberation and sovereign industrial development. And Western powers attacked them with equal brutality (Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, the DRC...).

This is the key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it is why they support the Israeli regime today... as Western settler-colonial outposts that can be used to attack and destabilize regional movements seeking socialism or any form of real economic sovereignty, whether in Angola or Mozambique or Zimbabwe or any of the Arab nationalist or socialist movements in North Africa and the Middle East.

Iran has always been central to this story. Western states orchestrated a coup against the extremely popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He was a left-leaning nationalist, not a socialist. But he wanted Iran to have control over its own resources (notably, oil), and for the US and Britain this was unacceptable. Mossadegh was replaced by a brutal Western-backed dictatorship. The revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship in 1979 - and constituted the current government - wasn't even left-leaning, much less socialist. But they want national economic self-determination and that is sin enough. They are a target for the exact same reasons that Iraq and Libya were targets.

The same goes for China. China's path toward sovereign industrialization - whether socialist or not - means that it is no longer an easy source of cheap labour for Western capital. And as the supply price increases so too does the sabre-rattling from Western states and media.

So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are backing obscene violence and plausible genocide in Gaza, against overwhelming international condemnation, because they must shore up their regional outpost at virtually any cost. The vast majority of the world supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. And now they are provoking war with Iran, risking regional conflagration, while at the same time encircling China with military bases, ramping up sanctions on Cuba, trying to contain progressive governments in Latin America, threatening invasion of the Sahel states...

It is intolerable and it cannot continue. The violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South who yearn for freedom and self-determination... the whole world is dragged into this horrifying nightmare. They are willing to inflict enormous suffering and misery on hundreds of millions of people in order to preserve existing dynamics of capital accumulation. We will not have peace until this arrangement is overcome and post-capitalist transformations are achieved.

[Sabahat Zakariya @sabizak]

Try to let a young minority boy say something like this about mosques or Islam or God in Pk.

https://t.co/AoNdeAQQd4

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

Today we are celebrating my dad @DrGaborMate's 80th birthday. He was born in Budapest on January 6th 1944, two months before Nazi Germany occupied Hungary.

He was able to escape the Jewish ghetto after his mother, Judy, gave him to a stranger on the street, who agreed to take him to cousins in a safer area.

Staying in a cold, overcrowded flat, they kept him warm by sleeping on each side of him. After reuniting with his parents, who managed to survive, they fled to Canada along with his brother Janos in 1956. Living in Vancouver, he became a student activist, writer, high school teacher, doctor, healer, and renowned author.

He and my mom Rae taught me and brother Daniel and sister Hannah from an early age to be uncompromising about the truth, both the personal and political, and to stand up for the oppressed, especially the Palestinians occupied in our name.

On his 80th birthday, I honor his life and all that he has given to me and to the world.

And my wish is that today's modern-day Jewish ghettos — the Gaza death camp and occupied West Bank — will be liberated from today's modern-day Nazis, the Israeli government, so that every Palestinian can have the same freedom to follow their life path that my dad has been fortunate to have.

[Talia @n_tamatar]

https://t.co/m39noqOSQC

[UBC Social Justice Centre @SJC_UBC]

Please read below.

[Central City @centralcity]

Show your support 👉 Homelessness looks different for everyone. We must never forget that people are more than their circumstances. Check out the Dignity Project display next to SFU #lookinthemirror #centralcitysurrey #surreybc

[Shahram Azhar @ShahramAzhar]

I get the governance, violence, and instability bit @TheEconomist but calling Pakistan 🇵🇰 a “global menace” (without any evidence to back that claim) is a gross exaggeration (and distasteful) to say the least.

Can anyone in the editorial team @TheEconomist help Pakistani economists understand this?

[Sufinama @Soofinama]

Sufi Kalam

Shayar - Hafeez Hoshiarpuri
Voice and Composition - Vasundhara Rogan

#Shayari #Sufism #HafeezHosiarpuri #Sufinama

[abd.koala @abdullah_koala]

Most desi people are really photogenic, but smartphones do a horrible job on our skin tones.

Here's a few simple ways to make sure our beiges and browns shine like they should 🧵

[Dr. Kaiser Bengali @kaiserbengali]

An interview with an event manager revealed: An upper class wedding has half a dozen events, with a dozen dish menu - n costs up to a total of a crore of rupees.
Hard fact: These same nights - n every night - a crore children go to bed hungry or half hungry.
Morally wrenching?

[Faheem Younus, MD @FaheemYounus]

COVID: Nu Variant

What is: “Ban flights from Africa”

What should be: Send resources (vaccines, funding, therapeutics) into Africa

Just 4% of Africans are vaccinated

Please. Think big

[Nisha Malhotra, Ph.D. @Nisha_Malhotra_]

Hope - Update: we've been here for 50 hrs now,. The burden of the stranded population has caused a food emergency in this small town. grocery stores are now out of milk, fresh fruit & vegetables with no way of replenishing the stock.
#bcfloods #HopeBC @premierofbc