Sapphire’s Brain Dump

....She's using the terms ironically.

She's using the "cool kid" lingo in a song about feeling out of touch and always trying to fit in.

This is beyond utterly horrifying.

Every single government in the world who didn't demand a permanent ceasefire nearly 10 months ago or with whom didn't state that Israhell must be sanctioned for their consecutive war crimes and crimes against humanity (and we know who you all are) -you have blood on your hands (and we also know you know this and most definitely don't care but the tide will not always be in your favour).

10 months... I repeat nearly 10 months have gone by and no one sitting in comfy chairs in offices with affluence and power have stopped this brutal mass acceleration of ethnic cleansing being done by a top ten military power in the world that is fully funded and backed by the United States government.

Palestinians have been and continue to be slaughtered EVERYWHERE in Gaza. In their homes, at schools, at places of worship, at any place of refuge -refugee camps... and so many still haven't even turned their way to see just how despicable it is because of the continuous dehumanization of Palestinian people.

And yet we are still supposed to believe this is about Hamas? This is about fighting terrorists? What exactly would it be called to bombard a civilian population who is trapped, is being starved and bombed to death, is being targeted with new war technology, and is being told ANY resistance to that is real terrorism...

You have zero humanity if you haven't seen what has been happening to Palestinians and haven't demanded Israel be sanctioned and brought to international courts for war crimes and genocide.

No one can convince me that Jaskier isn’t in love with Geralt.

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

I've seen so much misinformation parroted by pro Palestine sources -- "there can be no tunnels in Palestine, period, it's under the water line" (patently untrue, not how science works, Israel literally built tunnels and bunkers and basements in many buildings in Egyptian controlled Gaza in the past; denying it completely makes the case worse) "all Israeli captives are soldiers and generals" (no, there are some children, some of them very young; denying this is veering into dangerous rhetorical territory), and other things. There have been videos posted to tiktok, insta, and twitter that claim to have been "just filmed" but are actually several years old, or from entirely separate conflicts in other countries.

We are not immune to misinformation and propaganda.

There is enough unfairness, state-enacted terrorism, war crimes, and state-spouted lies to report on, and to share and call out and to decry. We don't need the fake shit, it only hurts your credibility. Fact check and read the actual news I beg you.

For all that the political Left likes to claim that they're without bias or bigotry, just existing as a Jew in Leftist spaces will quickly demonstrate otherwise. And for maximum irony, the patterns of systemic antisemitism on the Left don't mirror right-wing antisemitism. Instead, they mirror right-wing racism. Imperfectly, for sure, but the parallels between how the Right treats Black people and how the Left treats Jews are striking.

Discussions of systemic bigotry are deflected with Whataboutisms so that the instigating issue isn't addressed. For African-Americans, it's often "What about Black-on-Black crime?" and similar by the Right-Wing, and for Jews, it's "What about Israel?"

Alternatively, a prominent political advocacy organization is attacked and defamed in order to again deflect and dismiss. "BLM is violent and engages in riots!" or the usual libels against ACORN, and "Israel is fascist!" or the usual libels against AIPAC and the ADL.

At the same time, prominent dead members have their words cherrypicked to make people feel good about themselves and their treatment of that group. Contrast how MLK's "I had a dream!" speech is used by the Right-Wing with how Anne Frank's "I believe that people are fundamentally good at heart" is used by the Left.

On that same theme, token members are held up to deflect accusations of systemic bias. African-American right-wingers prove that the Right Isn't Racist, and Jewish Antizionists prove that the Left isn't antisemitic--or, conversely, the extremist members of the individual group are cherrypicked to "prove" that the whole group is like them.

Furthermore, laws are proposed or passed to disrupt cultural practices; people of African descent face bias for having natural hair, while Jews routinely face people proposing banning circumcision, kosher slaughter, or the keeping of an eruv. But, you see, they can't be biased, because they know all about that group... based on what they saw on TV/Movies/Wikipedia, so they know that the group can handle these laws and rules just "fine".

The targeted group are treated as having an unfair advantage in the racial hierarchy. Consider the parallels between a right-winger complaining about Affirmative Action, and a Left-Winger saying that, since "Jews are White and therefore privileged, antisemitism isn't real discrimination."

But as soon as one shows up in a space outside of where they "belong", they're treated with suspicion until proven that they're acceptable... if ever. A POC in a store is treated as a potential thief, and a Jew in public is automatically acceptable to interrogate if they're a "Zionist".

Consider also how historical revisionism is rife as well. For POC, slavery and imperialism are erased from textbooks, as well as the backlash against Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project and more. Meanwhile for Jews, pretty much nothing exists in educational curriculums between the start of the Diaspora (assuming it's even mentioned) and the Holocaust, which is treated as an aberration of bigotry instead of the culmination of centuries of hate. Even the admission of the real history is treated as an unforgiveable sin. Black people were never mistreated or enslaved, but were Guest Workers. Jews never came from the Levant and are Just White People From Europe.

And that's before we even get into systemic disenfranchisement. The original "ghetto" was the Jewish ghetto of Venice, and Jews are still routinely discriminated against for hiring, just as POC are.

But at the same time, everyone knows that "Blacks always play the race card" and that "Jews always accuse people of antisemitism."

And so on and so forth.

They're not perfect parallels--and I'm not saying that they are--but they are striking parallels in behavior.

__

I drafted this in April 2023, and it's been sitting in my drafts ever since, as I didn't have the courage to post it.

Guys T_T

His hands are shaking. 

There are so many conflicting motives at play, to push forward for scientific discovery, to keep working and stay loyal to your country, to work fast to ensure you have a weapon against fascists. But Judaism I don’t think can condone a weapon of mass destruction, no matter the circumstances. So how do you wrestle with trying to stop atrocities, while also potentially causing them?