Snitter

🌈 Internet lurker and tech enthusiast living on Kaurna Land. ☕️

[Snitter @witherwill]

Here to find tech news, lurk and watch the approaching iceberg.

[Sir Macintalk @SirMacintalk]

@LexiAlex I feel like part of the strategy is to make people like you waste a ton of time vetting everything you RT. If you step on one of their mines they get to discredit you and spread anti-Semitism at the same time. It's so cynically evil.

[@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) @timnitGebru]

I’m grateful for my DAIR team. They’re the ones who asked for a DAIR statement. I hope we can enable more ppl to create spaces like ours. If I’m going this crazy seeing the fascists in the industry I don’t know how I’d be if they were my actual colleagues & if I were Palestinian.

[Naomi Klein @NaomiAKlein]

About the McCarthyite attacks on artists who have signed various #CeasefireNOW open letters:

The central claim is that the letters are antisemitic b/c they do not have a line explicitly condemning Hamas' attacks on civilians on Oct 7.

Wrong, here's why 🧵

[Crikey @crikey_news]

OPINION | It’s time to dispel the myth that responsibility for the referendum’s defeat, should it come to pass, ultimately sits with voters. As Maeve McGregor writes, there is but one person who bears the blame: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

https://t.co/Xk0AI6kw36

[Jo Dyer @instanterudite]

The apologists for Lehrmann should consider their position carefully at this point. They were always incandescently awful but backing him in now reinforces their morally bankrupt position. Best hush now.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

No evidence produced that Hamas beheaded babies.
Headline = 'Hamas beheaded 40 babies'

Overwhelming evidence that Israel alone possesses weapons capable of flattening Gaza hospital.
Headline = 'We may never know who hit hospital'

[gianmarco @GianmarcoSoresi]

I think some people seem to be confused: war crimes are war crimes even during war

[Marc Lamont Hill @marclamonthill]

So many university academics who insist upon doing performative, virtue signaling “land acknowledgements” at every public event are eerily silent as real liberation struggles are happening. Guess decolonization really is a metaphor for some folk…

[Joseph Cox @josephfcox]

New: hackers are targeting a company that vets police data requests for tech giants. Cops can make emergency requests for customer data with no warrant. Now, hackers targeting platform that handles those requests themselves. Meta, LinkedIn, Fidelity, more https://t.co/9F5ZdXC2fd

[Cheryl Kernot @cheryl_kernot]

It’s one thing to have a politician using the term “nanny state”, but for a journalist to write it as fact for newsreader to read out in lead in, is very poor journalism @abcnews Who did that??? Not up to standard of basic reporting.

[Omar Sakr @omarsakrpoet]

Cried on the way to work this morning. Cried in the bathroom at work. Didn’t know how I was going to manage to perform at the NSW Art Gallery tonight but I did, and only cried once. So I’ll take that as a win. I am not okay and I can’t afford not to work.

[@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) @timnitGebru]

Watching in real time the stuff we read about in the history books about apartheid and occupation, how its supported by all major bodies and the lengths they go to to maintain the status quo, how those who oppose it are persecuted, how the world's weapons are used to maintain it.

[Charles W McKinney, Jr. @CharlesWMcKinn2]

Racism and Fascism, by Toni Morrison:
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another 1/

[Kat Tenbarge is on Bluesky @kattenbarge]

Referring to human beings as animals, savages, etc is always a form of dehumanization. And it’s never journalistic. Because it’s not true. Humans = humans. Even if they do horrible things, that’s because humans are capable of extreme violence. Not animals — humans.

[@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) @timnitGebru]

Never in my life have I seen a world sanctioned genocide in full display, being livetweeted & live streamed, with officials not even hiding their intentions, and people condemning it being attacked in full force. Usually genociders take some effort to hide what they're doing.

[Yonah Lieberman 🔥 @YonahLieberman]

As a Jewish person, I wish I could spend this week grieving and mourning. But the Israeli government is weaponizing our grief to enact a second Nakba, killing thousands and displacing millions. I can make time to grieve while also working to stop ethnic cleansing.

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

When you say “I want to make the world a better place,” you add an implicit “I want power and should be trusted with it.”

Increasingly, I think “Copenhagen ethics,” as critically defined in Jai’s influential essay, is basically correct. When you try to solve something, you assert power over it. That matters.

Asserting power is not a neutral act. You tell people: I have identified a problem. I know what will make it better. Trust me—let me step in, let me Do Something—and the world will become a better place.

That’s a good thing, often. Almost every good work comes from an assertion of power. But by interacting with situations, you change them. You make others more or less likely to step in. You direct resources one direction or another. Should you succeed, you tend to acquire more power.

And when your good intent goes wrong, because you have asserted power, it goes wrong on a scale unimaginable for the regular, powerless person—the one who never interacted with the problems at all.

Effective Altruism is a noble concept that draws many well-meaning people. It is also, fundamentally, an assertion of power. The fall of SBF is a good illustration of its failure state: power irresponsibly gained and redirected, with countless left to pay the costs of its failure. When your circle of moral concern—those you feel a responsibility to act on behalf of—is the entire world, you assert power over the entire world.

This is at the front of my mind as I watch the tragedy unfolding in Israel and the commentary on it. Every act of public commentary is an assertion of power: Listen to me. Think and do as I say. My thoughts should impact this setting.

I get a taste of this every time I choose to cover a topic, sometimes intensely so. I learn deeply personal things about people and situations far from me. In my recent article about the backstory behind a beach altercation, I dug through half a decade of ugly and intensely personal drama between people I had never heard of prior to the altercation, and needed to choose what to attach their names to in the public eye. When I assert that power carelessly, I open myself to justifiable blame.

Jai’s post is worth reading. It’s full of compelling examples of people trying to do good in neglected areas and being lambasted for their trouble. But I think in neglecting the role of assertion of power it reflects a common blind spot among altruistically minded people, encouraging a fantasy: that you can Do Good without opening yourself up to the costs of Doing Good Wrong.

Do good. Say things worth saying. Get involved in causes that matter to you. But understand that every time you do so, you enmesh yourself in a web of responsibilities. The assertion of power is neither trivial nor costless.