saturday morning eye of the storm

 i just sent scrapper an overshare response to "how are things on your end" and i feel it's worth recording for myself:

from my side, i guess these are the times the chinese always threatened us with (“may you live in interesting times”)…

mr smear managed to close out his first year in the arts school without getting kicked out (though he managed to come close on a number of occasions), and in general he’s been maturing in front of our eyes and he’s doing infinitely better than this time last year. he just started learning to rollerblade this past couple of months, and he’s enjoying our rides much more than he was on a bike which is awesome. also, he’s joined one of his friends at a keitana which turned out to be a survivalist school-themed LARP where they learn how to construct and use weapons and have lectures on pyrotechnics 😛 

gd’s been having a rough time, we discovered recently that she’s either been celiac or has had a really intense reactions to gluten* for a long time and it just got much worse the past year or so. the good news is that a couple of months gluten free and her mind and body are in a much better place than they’ve been in years.

* this is obvious karma for us describing ourselves as “allergic to gluten free” for most of the last decade 😅

as for me, 2026 so far has been pretty wild. i’ve been getting deeper and deeper into AI both at work and in my side projects, and i can tell you that the entire industry has completely lost its mind. the tools are at the same time amazing and utter garbage, everything is hype and we’re watching tech leaders making the most ridiculously foolish plays right in front of our eyes. it’s mass psychosis and it’s disturbing as all hell. 

aside from that, i’ve been struggling on and off to figure out how to print my comics and i'm becoming more and more frustrated that none of the indie comic creators in israel seem to be interested in banding together and making it easier for everyone…

otherwise, the financial strain of living hand-to-mouth in tel aviv is “business as usual” stress, and so far the summer weather has been relatively kind, and i’m sitting on a balcony in a cool breeze and life is, somehow, pretty damned good.

...

last night was rough. emotionally and psychologically, gd and i had an argument about how we each see the world (when it comes to defining "normal" behavior in other people after the very upsetting start to season 3 of infinity train) which resulted in the always-uncomfortable "agree to disagree". that was followed by a particularly rough night, first with the hip flexors and then with indigestion that forced me upright when i desperately needed to be horizontal and took about two hours to calm down enough to let me get back to sleep. then it was morning, and after about half an hour trying to sleep in i gave up and got up to make myself coffee and sit on the balcony and make peace with my life.

...

rough night or no, rough times or no, in this moment right here and now i feel particularly blessed. the weather is beautiful and calm, the birds are singing, and our highway intersection and its surroundings are full of greens (and bright yellows), and interesting tall glass architecture (which i love because it almost makes the buildings camouflaged against the sky), and in spite of all my anxieties i seem to doing okay right now.

cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

the malicious compliance genie

 today was rough. i started writing an article inspired by it, but then the evening fell apart, and by the time we all reset i was too tired and depressed.

today was a long and difficult day battling with AI in an effort to get it to explain the current state of the system i'm working with. and the more i dug, the weirder things got. i feel completely out of my depth, and i'm under immense time pressure, and it's not fun. and most of the effort was in getting the AI to follow my instructions without doing its own thing.

i was ready to leave the office more than an hour before i was finally able to walk out the door. i came home, dropped off my bag, took the recycling down, then left again to try and get my hair cut. i managed to get my hair cut, and it's not bad but it's much shorter than gd's happy with... so i had to buy her a bottle of wine to make up for it :P

gd had her wine, i had a beer, and dinner was nice. after dinner we chatted with my mom, and then things got tense because gd's struggling with the infestation (which she's already effectively stopped, but she's freaking out about the final clean). and along with that, the usual struggle to get mr smear to just shower and get ready for bed without drama. and then he got out of the shower and showed us that he's got some new issue with a couple of his toenails (looks like his shoes might be too small) which is yet another thing we didn't need to deal with. and then, while trying to calm down and get ready for bed, gd needed to discuss something political which i didn't really want to talk about, but i also didn't want her to stew alone about.

so now i've played (and been defeated in) a map of slay the spire 2 with the regent, and i've written this, and i've finished my tea, and i'm hoping that i'll not only sleep tonight, but also not wake up feeling like a haven't.

i can't believe tomorrow's thursday. i have a one-on-one with my manager, i guess it's going to be an interesting day.

sleep journal entry

 no lower back pain, and no (or not much) post-nasal drip. but my sleep was fitful throughout the night.

...

we had a lovely night last night, we ate too much, talked constantly and the kids all got along great.

i climbed out of bed after who-know-how-long deciding whether i was awake or not, and finished reading never again will i visit auschwitz over coffee on the balcony; partially because it's so good, partially because i was in a hurry to finish it so that i can focus on starship troopers.

the ending triggered some feelings, and gd and i don't exactly agree, and then my mother got pulled into it, but here's my review:

i'll start by saying that this book is a bit contentious in my household because of the author's political leanings and interpretations; as israeli jews, we're both scared by and scared for the jews in the US who have been convinced that trump is a fascist when he's the one leading the fight against communist-jihadist fascism.

setting that caveat aside, what a remarkable, insightful, eye-opening, and - dare i say - important look both at the holocaust itself, and at the differences between the german and polish reactions to it so many decades later. it's a fantastic graphic novel experience in and of itself, an excellent work of art, and the stories it tells are both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

we're currently living through a time of great anxiety and confusion - between the wars we're waging to protect ourselves from genocide again, and the pogroms against jews all over the world - and this book does an excellent job of connecting us to the victims of the sho'ah and understanding that we're facing essentially the exact same things as before.

now mr smear is starting to wake up, and he was making noises about going swimming this morning. we have furniture to build, and he's got laser tag in the evening, and i'm hoping to make some AI harness progress today... i guess this is going to be a busy day!

sleep diary / politically asleep

 i've been using the consensus sleep diary for the past couple of days, and i've just gotten stuck on the fact that you can review your sleep stats dashboard, but not the comments you made - unless you're adept with the developer tools. so, for myself, i'm copying my comments here:

i'm not sure how long before 6.30am i woke up, i feel like it was a long time though. yesterday was my first time using both iron and magnesium supplements and i didn't suffer from the usual discomfort, just a bit of restlessness

on multiple occasions throughout the night i giggled at trump's absurd and acerbic humor.

...

then, first thing this morning, i woke up to respond to an instagram thread with a highly intelligent, educated man whose political extremism has been distressing me for years:

him: A blockade is an act of war. That's why during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the US referred to it as a quarantine. Both the action, its intricacies and the specific wording were discussed and debated thoroughly. Oh well. Clip from Thirteen Days. I like it.

me: did you know that the irgc was blockading the straits up until a few days ago ? why didn't you post this then?

him: Of course I knew. I don't know of any historical analog, especially one with a dramatic Hollywood adaptation that includes the US principals discussing the blockade. Is there?

me: interesting - the timing of your post suggests that when the americans do it it's nefarious

him: nefarious means wicked or villainous. If you consider war as that, then yes. I don't. I think it's an act of war. Which requires approval from Congress.

me: ah, so it's okay that americans are using force to protect american interests, it's just an issue with protocol? cool, cool

...

[i'm] just perpetually curious how someone so intelligent and educated always seems to be pushing an anti-west agenda 🤷

him: Showing the lunacy and abhorrence that is the Trump administration is anti-West? Color me anti-West then.

me: if you can only see lunacy and abhorrence, then yes, you're anti-west. a pity.

him: I see much more. Terror. Abuse. Fascism. Sadness. Democratic decline. Mental decline, not to say dementia. Fear. Spinelessness. Systemic failure. At a glance.

...

what are you seeing that I don't? (I forgot grift and open corruption on an unprecedented scale, just came to mind as well)

me: a whole different side to the internet, and history. it begins before the end of the cold war, with the kgb inventing "active measures", and evolves into decades of unholy alliance between the russians, chinese, qataris and iranians to destabilize the west and create a massive, well-funded disinformation army that infiltrates western institutions and makes the media (traditional and social) push out propaganda at a terrifying scale. and that all rides on the back of social media algorithms that are financially incentivized to raise engagement by any means necessary, generating mass psychosis on all sides of the political spectrum as we learn that "folie à deux" scales. i recommend trying to balance out your media diet, the other side isn't all lies like you've been led to believe. also talking to your fellow israelis without assuming that everyone with a different understanding is either brainwashed or a bad actor (that's a general statement, i'm not accusing you of anything - it's possible you just don't happen to have people with different opinions in your circles).

waiting for news...

 today was a weird day. mr smear woke up from a nightmare in the early morning, and his yelling woke me up from my own nightmare, from which i didn't get back to sleep.

one achievement was getting mr smear to agree to post his cartoon from yesterday, and after frustratedly trying a bunch of apps i ended up using gimp to crop it correctly. at least i had gimp.

it took a while, but i managed to get an answer regarding my unemployment, and i've put in a request to the employment office to submit my status to social security like they were supposed to...

i don't remember why i ended up having to rush to get to the office (my employer's office, not my client's), but i arrived *just* in time for a call with an insurance agent. after that, i found a desk and got to work.

it was a very quiet morning, but i did have a chat with a coworker who i learned is on contract with the company i was interviewing with when i signed my contract, which was interesting.

i went to sumsum for lunch, which was an opportunity to have a proper sync with my mom about mr smear's situation and warm up in the sun.

in the afternoon, we had the third session for our AI workflow course, and i was a lot more focused than the previous one. we ended a bit early, which gave me time to get home in time for my phone appointment with mr smear's doctor, who's apparently written me the referrals i asked for.

apparently mr smear had a good day, meaning he didn't get into big trouble.

...

after a long, long time using brave, i've finally reinstalled chrome and copied everything back over. there's so much good about brave, especially the vertical tabs, but i've finally lost patience with not having address history, and the syncing doesn't work as well...

...

aside from a fight with gd over musical tastes (it's a long, decade-old story), the evening was smooth, dinner was good and - oh, yeah. mr smear only went to bed around 9pm because he still had a whole lot of studying to do for his greek history test tomorrow.

oh! mr smear spoke to me in hebrew this evening, entirely of his own volition.

now i'm watching revolution updates from tousi tv and being devastated to have learned tonight that cory doctorow is jewish and has fallen hook, line and sinker for the palestinian genocide lie, and we're praying that we don't need to enter the bomb shelters tonight (or at all) because gd can't breathe down there...

the persian people have to win this. their bravery is incredible.

contemplation

yesterday:

mr smear went to school by himself again, which makes us a bit nervous but i guess it's no different from him coming back home by himself... parenting is weird.

i had a chat with urchin, who's just been laid off along with a bunch of her coworkers due to a change in management. amazing timing, right before the holidays. she's apparently interested in some of our open positions, which would be cool.

yesterday was long. lots of context switching, lots of issues that were supposed to be resolved the day before but weren't. lots of planning with my coworkers (mostly productive and positive). one emotional outburst about procedure that got me called in to a room by the rnd manager to tell me i'd made a bad vibe... i just apologize to her and the guy in question, and i've got a lesson to learn.

on my way into our apartment i picked up a second notice* for the two fluxx games i ordered a while back, which was apparently sent three weeks ago. it took so long to be delivered that they've returned the package, which is really unfair :(

* a first notice was never sent, neither were any emails or sms messages...

i came home just in time for dinner, just in time to see gd almost collapse from the sudden onset of something. i rushed myself and mr smear through dinner while she rested, wished them both a good night, and then headed out to the british ze german's shiva house.

it's always weird and sad walking past my mother and my old apartment.

the next couple of hours weren't unpleasant, the story of my friend's sister's passing notwithstanding. ru55 and the irish ze german were there too, and i alternated between conversation flow and just sitting and listening. ru55 gave me a ride home, i brushed my teeth and showered, and then sat down to do some more testing for our contractor.

it didn't take long to get stuck and stop the testing. and then suddenly there were noises coming from mr smear's room, where gd was attending to him and his suddenly sore throat. when i went in to commiserate he sent me away, but a bit later called out to me, really upset that he'd forgotten to call my mom to say good night 🥹

and then, in the middle of the night, gd decided that we urgently needed to do online grocery shopping :/

today:

i slept alright, but i've been feeling a bit on/off today. mr smear's leg seems to have healed, so we left him to his devices (ha ha) and headed to the pharmacy*, did some grocery shopping and picked up a pokémon puzzle for tomorrow.

* we left the first one in a huff because someone was drilling and there was dust everywhere while a bunch of sick and elderly people were waiting

i did some more work with the contractor, and then the new cleaning lady arrived. she insisted on wearing her shoes in the apartment, which gd eventually conceded and which i'm too nervous to discuss with her later when i get home from my voluntary exile at our favorite coffee shop. i somehow got dragged into a political discussion with her, which included a very awkward "we're not going to agree or understand each other" moment, but also her thanking me profusely for oversharing with a stranger.

i've spent the past few hours slowly drinking coffees, eating a sandwich, and trying not to fall asleep in the comfy armchair while slowly reading some more blindsight.

and spending a fair amount of time just staring into space. i guess i have a lot of processing to do.

processing

 i'm feeling less physically and emotionally drained today, but i'm still struggling. mostly emotionally and in terms of desperately needing an uninterrupted day off.

yesterday:

starting to write up my experiences with bigtalk

mr smear and the drone workshop - he kind of shut down the moment he encountered the other kids, which really sucked. but my coworker who was running it was kind enough to do a private drone session later, and mr smear had an amazing time ^_^

...

making progress with the new devops guy, but uncovering layers of bigtalk's bullshit (amateur-hour and AI vomit). my boss informing me that bigtalk's hearing was basically him begging not to be let go, which is heartbreaking. i really feel bad for him, and i feel like the whole world has let this dude down; and he is one courageous dude.

...

a big moment with mr smear about tearing up artwork he doesn't like

planning to get dinner with mr smear (gd was getting her hair cut), and his friend inviting him to play table tennis. accompanying the two clowns on the bus, sharing hummus, falafel and chips for dinner, and occasionally jumping in to play some ping pong.

my mom's laptop being expertly stolen from her car

getting the kids home late (because his friend realized he'd left his phone by the tables when we were already on the bus we'd waited a while for)

a very late bedtime for mr smear, and therefore for us too

today:

i slept alright, but woke up early with my thoughts. continued writing.

we had a family meeting in the morning (regarding mr smear's workshop behavior, and his looking-at-his-failures behavior), and mr smear was very angry with me. but on our way home this evening, we had a very mature discussion and he acknowledged what we were trying to get through to him.

gd took mr smear to have bloodwork done while i had a meeting, apparently mr smear handled it impressively well.

it was a quiet day at work, though jam-packed with meetings and included a very intense lunchtime debate about israeli politics. it also included a two-hour long demo by a contractor, and i found it very validating that the new guy and i both came up with similar alternatives to his architecture and we both feel that what he's put together in two months is something either of us could do in a matter of hours... and better.

i came home, and took mr smear to dizengoff for their japanese food. we had dumplings and onigiri again, and mr smear ate the dumplings with chopsticks this time, and then we walked home picking up ice cream on the way. and talking a lot.

a lot of the talk was about bigtalk, and why this is such a difficult experience for me personally.

...

on an unrelated note, but running in parallel through the day, is responding to a south african connection on linkedin's anti-israel propaganda post. i felt i couldn't let the lies stand unchallenged, but the experience is gross.

...

i don't want to take vacation days unless i can actually enjoy the vacation, and i don't feel like that's going to happen anytime soon :(

never a dull moment

 yesterday was perfect, right until the end. mr smear came home, we grabbed our gear and headed to the pool. he put in the work, and he's improving dramatically. he's learning how to handle showering and changing in a locker room, and after that we returned home for a calm and peaceful afternoon. he did creative stuff on the old macbook with ubuntu (he made a really cool pacman image with gimp), while i tried to repeat thursday evening's steps in unity on my windows machine. we watched the "season" finale of asterix & obelix - the big fight, which was great fun even though it's totally not canon, and right after all that wonderful stuff gd and i got into a huge row that took forever to... not quite resolve, but to bring to an end and leave lots of stuff to think about.

today:

i didn't sleep well last night, partially due to waking up in the middle of it feeling a lot of unpleasant feelings. i ended up "sleeping" quite late, and waking up with a really sore neck.

my damaged toenail flipped a bit this morning, so it was time to remove it. it... seems okay? i hope it regrows safely...

it's fair to say that i've spent most of the day watching youtube videos and doing really hard quests minesweeper.

we watched a minecraft movie together, but mr smear left half an hour in to go to his friend. i can see why he loved it so much, and it's definitely entertaining in a very jack black kind of way, but it's not quite gd or my cup of tea. so we rewatched léon: the professional after that, which i haven't seen since high school. there were three things i remembered from that movie: mathilda sitting by the stairs swinging her legs, mathilda walking with the plant, and the explosive moment that me and my friend laughed at in triumphant relief just as his dad walked in a furiously berated us for enjoying such intense violence.

i think i appreciated it much more for having read nabokov's lolita, i thought the playfulness of the two characters was beautiful and found the transformation from something sexual endearing.

in the evening, with a little help from looking at my coworker's thursday evening code, i managed to get my first unity project doing an approximation of what i'd intended, i've documented every step for myself and i'm looking forward to our next session.

one thing that i've learned, though, is that microsoft's made it complicated / against the terms of usage to use vscode extensions in windsurf and cursor, so i've now returned to the vscode fold and subscribed to copilot once again. and now that i've taken care of that, i think i'm ready to get back down to business with the language project.

the harvest

 i went to bed much later than i should have last night, mostly because i was making more progress with the language project. by the time i hit the hay i was done. and i feel like i slept pretty well.

this morning got off to a rocky start. it was going smoothly enough and then gd and i had an explosive argument about mr smear + screentime + friends. it definitely could've gone better.

work today was very quiet - two of the team in the office, one CEO, an ex-saffer visitor who turned out to be an investor and whose questions about my previous CTO made me uncomfortable (otherwise our interaction was cool), followed by a surprising and very short visit by said previous CTO.

oh, and another coworker came in for a bit, we literally just shared youtube videos and political discussion*. and i learned he and his partner have adopted a husky. i feel sad about any huskies in the desert, but he seems to know how to handle it.

* triggered by the news yesterday about iranian nuclear capabilities. why the fuck didn't we take out the regime last year??

otherwise, i was assured on thursday that the pashtida was vegan, so i had two slices for breakfast. only later did i notice that its cover said GF (for gluten free) but not vegan, so i double-checked and learned that it was not, in fact, vegan :/

psychosomatic or not, i felt gross, headachy, and even a little puky at the thought. i went home, trying to hurriedly pick up some juice and ending up getting into a whole thing with the markolet owners over a refund for a 50 shekel container of apricots. which reminds me, i tried to purchase jusant yesterday and my shitty dell xps can't run it, so i applied for a refund (and received it).

it pisses me off that i spent so much money on this machine and it's never really done what it needed to do without a fight. and i'm pretty confident i can't afford a new windows machine right now.

the rest of the afternoon was spent fighting with mr smear, progressively more aggressively, until he eventually got through two fucking math exercises that weren't even a real challenge for him. even he can't tell us what that was about, after he got through them he made a point of apologizing to both of us for the drama that basically cost everyone a half a day and gained nobody anything.

although at some point gd spilled a cup of juice as she angrily rounded the table to check on him, and i put my back out helping to clean up. so there's that.

chag sameach.

bonfires

 ah, i remember the conspiracy theory now: trump is burying israel so that he can bring us all in to the US as refugees where we'll rapidly integrate and give them a huge tech and manufacturing advantage.

...

yesterday:

another rough day, much less intense than before but with plenty of intensity left to go around. and lots of surprises / factually incorrect theories that led us down rabbit holes while we were trying to get something urgent (literally) out the door.

i ate too much vegan cake at the happy hour (and forgot to bring the rest home), while a new coworker regaled me with inappropriate tales about his parenting approach during covid. and i shared inappropriate stories with some of my coworkers about the horrible things my son has said to me over the years...

we managed to be "delivery ready" just after 6pm.

as it was lag ba'omer, i tried to find a bonfire but none were reasonably close / guaranteed to include actual bonfires. so instead, i took mr smear for a long, really good walk to the beach, where we had ice cream, and then we had a long, mostly good walk back (minus rushing into a stairwell in a random - but very nice - building when the houthis attacked).

today:

i didn't sleep very well. what made it worse was waking up in the middle of the night to pee, and seeing a notification from threads (which i've tried to opt-out from) for a particularly nasty and libellous antisemitic claim. it took me a while to calm down after that.

the morning started off pretty shit, with another fight with mr smear about screentime even though he's been punished with no screentime. that got ugly.

then i put in some work hours, figuring something out and then fixing a different thing, and then i took mr smear out for a walk. we went to the museum, where we saw some really interesting stuff which triggered some very big feelings (motherland), and although he needed some "herding" he came to the party and we left the museum with a good vibe.

the next part of our walk went really badly, but after he understood what the dynamics needed to be (i can't believe this is what we're doing these days) we made some good progress. our walk continued to the mall, where we had falafel for lunch and picked up two heavy bags of muesli which he carried most of the way home.

on the way home, we passed the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness monument, and appreciated its structure.

i was really tired when we got home, but before i could nap i had to have a massive fight with my wife over trust issues, and i'm extremely grateful that in spite of all the feelings i managed to express myself well enough that it was resolved in a really positive way.

i did some more work in the afternoon, i managed to make some progress but nothing satisfying, and now the sun's about to set and we're about to make kiddush.

shabbat shalom

rage against the machines (and little boys)

 i didn't sleep well, and a meaningful contributor to that was reading aethersmith's message that included the phrase "if someone came to with with the argument you are using re the israel / palestine conflict, would you feel the same way?" right before going to bed.

i took my time considering my response, discussing my thoughts with my family and my coworkers, and this evening sent this in response:

firstly, no. but that's because we're literally fighting against armies of genocidal maniacs who not only want to wipe out me and my family and my people, but have successfully infiltrated western media and academia and are convincing everyone that wiping us out is okay. let's contrast that to "you're stealing my art and hurting my livelihood".

nobody makes art without stealing art, and very few artists in the history of art have consented to their art being studied and practiced and cloned. if your art's good, people are going to want to copy it. up until now the only ways your artwork has been protected has been when the copies are clear attempts at forgery and are being passed off as authentic, and the barriers to entry in producing art being really high. 

you're upset because there's shit art. weren't you upset before?

you're upset because artists are losing work. that's fair, but everything's being disrupted lately, and that's not just because of AI or the current method of training models. and if anyone's livelihoods are being compromised, trust me - us software developers are the first in line for the chopping block.

am i worried about what's coming? honest answer: somewhat. but at the same time, we can choose to embrace and adapt or we can choose to fight.

i do NOT, in ANY way, condone you taking the fight to the users of the new technology and trying to coerce us into boycotting something we simply don't agree with you about. you think it's unethical? that's okay. we disagree. and that's okay too. your fight isn't with me, but maybe i'm just an easier target for you than the AI companies and people who are training their models without compensating artists. maybe you should fight with them about it.

and maybe you'd be more effective in getting people on your side if you showed a little bit of empathy, tried to understand that they're not evil scum because they're on the opposing side of a debate that you've decided shouldn't exist. sometimes it doesn't matter whether you're right as much as whether you're effective, and i promise you you're not helping your cause by gunning for individuals who aren't responsible for the things that are scaring you.

i'm not your enemy, and neither are any of the other end users of this incredible-but-highly-flawed technology.

...

this morning was okay, i walked mr smear to school and then continued on to the post office to return a bunch of stuff we bought that doesn't fit.

thoughts for the walk to and from the post office: the generative ai thing, and "real mean pick up after their dogs".

i cleaned out more crow poop from a windowsill 🤮, then gd and i did some grocery shopping, interrupted halfway by a visit from a friend. i ended up leaving for work a bit later than planned, but it was fine.

it was a busy day. my lead decided to pause the project i've been stressing over the past few work days, which doesn't feel very good but i understand it. a few of us walked to sumsum for lunch, which was nice. my lunch break, which usually lasts about twenty minutes, turned into an hour because someone got me talking about shakespeare's sonnets and someone from each subsequent lunch group caught the tail end of the conversation and then started a new one :P

we had a long presentation on "nonviolent communication", which wasn't very exciting, but had some interesting bits nonetheless. that triggered a political discussion with my lead that got a bit heated, but i think i managed to deescalate effectively.

i left early to pick up a handheld vacuum cleaner because ours finally died. they were out of stock, as was the closest store. [in retrospect, i could have tried their competitors across the road]

oh, yeah - and our washing machine's leaking. so i have to take care of that in the morning :/

i walked home, and tried to get through mr smear's homework with him.

that... did not go well. it went very badly. it went a lot worse than usual. he still doesn't get that this is home, and that he can't escape being jewish, and that refusing to integrate is only hurting him.

and this was all before we addressed the fact that his hebrew teacher sent me a report today informing me that he still hasn't been participating.

we had dinner, while gd simmered with rage.

we tried again with the homework. things got even worse. gd lost it. on the one hand, she was really, really harsh with him. on the other, i believe he needed it. he's developed a bizarrely warped view of how the world works and what's fair and what's not, and it's really not serving him.

hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

i played through inscryption, then responded to aethersmith, and then decided that i didn't have it in me to get any work done so i've been doing minesweeper.online quests while watching youtube videos. i'm starting to fall asleep now. maybe tonight will be the night 🤞

dust in, dust out

the jackals are howling again - they've been a lot more brazen the past few days, and they've been going at it at all hours. also, very confrontational with dogs being walked even during daylight (O_o)

should we be worried about mr smear?

yesterday:

yesterday began with a fight - kind of the usual - between gd and mr smear about getting out of bed. and then mr smear stayed home again, i tried to take him to school but he threw up just outside the gate (ewww!) and so we turned around and walked back home, stopping on a bench for a good talk.

oh, yeah - and a handyman came in to clean up the underside of our kitchen sink, which entailed us clearing out, cleaning and repacking everything while simultaneously getting mr smear ready for school. the fun part was using sealant on a lifted edge of the sink :P

i started my word day cleaning the dust off everything after the workers were supposed to be done, but within a very short while it was clear that they were far from done, and all of our belongings and our lungs were coated with yet another layer of dust that i'm praying doesn't include asbestos.

it was a frustrating day of tweaking kubernetes installations and annoying the guy i'm reporting to, who was working remotely which made it feel worse. but i was also involved in some product discussions and i feel like i contributed.

eventually i hit partial success, just in time to interview another coworker and dig in to the all-hands / happy hour treats.

i didn't have another "nap attack" episode yesterday, but i did make an appointment to discuss them with my doctor.

as has become standard practice, i came home and sat with mr smear for his maths and reading. unfortunately, he got frustrated with how i explained a word to him and gd - who'd been holding on to the morning's grievance, amongst other things - completely lost it.

the day ended with a different kind of fight, or family meeting, or family meeting with lots of yelling, but it feels like we got through to mr smear and gd expressed some stuff that's obviously been hurting her for a long time. as she said - sometimes it's only when you start to heal from something that you really begin to realize the depths of the trauma.

anyway, it wasn't a fun experience for anyone but i feel like we all were in a better place by the time mr smear left the table to brush his teeth and climb into bed.

...

i passed out watching monk, dragged myself to bed when gd went, and slept fitfully through the night, dreaming a lot of very realistic dreams about returning to the army.

today:

this time mr smear actually went to school, and i went in after him to find someone to help me understand why it was so hard for him to get to his friday juggling classes. eventually i got some hints, and i sent them to mr smear on whatsapp, and i returned home.

gd went to her sewing class, and i spent much of my morning trying to do something constructive* while my stomache did flips for no apparent reason. or maybe it's related to the fact that i seem to be coming down with something - i don't think my sinuses and throat are going haywire just from the dust exposure.

* i surprised myself by actually succeeding, i published an article about apt-key being deprecated

until i received a phone call from mr smear, telling me that he'd been in a classroom by himself (he hadn't seen / had chosen not to see my messages) and was accosted by two of the bullies in his class. understanding the worst, i managed to get him to go to his juggling class in spite of how furious i was with him for giving anyone an opportunity to hurt him (not as furious as i was with the bullies, and not that i was blaming him, which i explained to him later), and on my way to the school to pick him up i consulted with my mom about whether it makes sense to go to the police when the school's clearly not willing or able to protect our children.

i think that's exactly what i'm going to do from now on.

fortunately, when i sat him down and got the details out of him it turned out that the bullying was only harassment, not assault, which was a huge relief. and aside from that incident it appears that he actually had a pretty good day.

we walked home, and the two bullies were walking across the road from us. i awkwardly gave them angry side-eye, which they noticed, with my tongue between my teeth. in retrospect, i handled that wrong and i should have been giving them an evil smile instead.

next time.

mr smear switched bags* and we caught a bus to azrieli to meet up with gd and buy underwear. and snacks. oh! on the way back from dropping mr smear off at school this morning i picked up a couple of things, one of which being pistachio-covered cashews. which seems ridiculous, but even more ridiculous is how much like cookies it tastes.

* one day, we pray, he's not going to need to carry an epipen around with him wherever he goes

the rest of the afternoon has been pretty quiet, only slightly interrupted by a call with ze german who i've been trying to help... it's not that i don't want to help him, but i'm completely out of bandwidth while he doesn't really have anyone else for what i'm assisting him with.

...

i've spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to get my head around what i'm doing for work, who i'm working with, what the expectations are. it's been a difficult time personally, but i feel like i'm going to need to start opening the throttle and doing a lot more than my nine-to-five. it's also been made clear that i'm expected to go on-site occasionally, which i've assured gd won't be unsafe even though i'm not entirely confident that that's true.

...

politically it was a difficult week, or couple of weeks. between the stories (and eulogy) from the recently released hostages to the amount of disinformation online - specifically mastodon and vimeo, which make it impossible to report.

the first day

 i managed to sleep alright last night, but i was pretty anxious this morning. i made sure that mr smear understood what the meeting was going to be about, and i'll be honest, by the time it was done i was quite relieved that i hadn't posted anything on social media.

after quite the interrogation - including a hilarious part for which i had to bite my tongue* - we ascertained that the social boycott we thought was happening isn't really happening. but we also established that the bullying and violence is very real, and that they need to make a move on dealing with it. additionally, they pretty much convinced me that moving mr smear out of the class right now isn't the best move (mainly because his current teacher and her incoming replacement are, to their minds, the most sympathetic / best suited to deal with mr smear) and that it's worth waiting for the recommendation from the evaluation (which should be concluding this week).

* mr smear was pretty insistent on how unfair it was that his bully was recognized for doing good schoolwork, even after we'd all explained that it was irrelevant :P

the meeting didn't produce an amazing feeling by any stretch, but i walked out feeling like things were relatively okay.

the meeting ended much later than i'd hoped, so i scrambled to get to my new office as soon as i could. the morning was spent meeting lots of interesting people, getting the tour, beginning to get my computer and office access set up, joining my first standup, followed by a very long but surprisingly intelligible presentation on our architectural overview.

it's been an extremely long time since i was introduced to a system that just makes sense. it's elegant, and i feel considerably more at ease about what i'm getting into.

i went with my (for now) manager to get breakfast / lunch (it was around 3pm already), and until i tucked in i hadn't actually realized just how hungry i was. and i managed to stop eating a little after hitting the "too much" point, even though it was absolutely delicious.

after we returned, i made myself a (really strong) coffee and resumed setting up my machine, at which point gd called to inform me that she couldn't find the authorization form for her nerve block... so i sighed loudly, and rushed home to grab it and my family and walk to the pain clinic.

the process was, from start to finish, more straightforward than usual and much quicker than anticipated.

...

the taxi home, though, was completely ridiculous. we were picked up by an old lady taxi driver, who immediately took offense that she could smell that gd had just smoked cannabis, complaining that it would damage her lungs. this turned into a very weird argument, at which point i pulled out my phone and she said "you think google's going to convince me?!"

once we'd established that it wasn't dangerous, she went on a tirade about some (probably fictitious) bride in her wedding dress who refused to get in her taxi once because she smelled... weed? cigarettes? who knows. so i asked if this had occurred once, or if it had occurred many times. to which she responded: "if i told you only once, what would that mean?"

"that she had issues."

ooooh, shit. the taxi driver began berating me for daring to judge a stranger i'd never met. eventually, still very heatedly, she asked "and what difference would it make if it was many passengers?"

"that their behavior was somewhat normal, and therefore somewhat reasonable."

at that point we were approaching our street, so she slowed down very dramatically to share a "tip for life" with me: that if you're arguing with someone and they're starting to show signs of losing interest, you should stop arguing. with that, she dropped us off, and i gave her the single-star rating she deserved.

holy shit, some people should not be working in the service industry.

we got gd upstairs, mr smear showered, dinner served, discussed marijuana usage with mr smear (who'd understood most of the argument, and was surprisingly completely on my side), who assured me that he would never smoke (cigarettes) "because i made a vow to my dad", and who paid attention when i explained the risks of consuming illicit drugs while one's brain is still forming...

anyway.

we had a good good-night chat with my mom, and had enough time between dinner and bedtime for me to shower and join mr smear for some calvin & hobbes. i am soooooo glad i managed to get hold of those comics!

after putting him to bed, i continued setting up my machine, and also started a fantastic run in kaycee's mod abusing the fair-hand mechanic:

unkillable hooved tribe totem FTW.

and now it's half-past-midnight and definitely past my bedtime.

colonial psychopathy

So, I'm up, wondering if a psychologist somewhere is doing or has done their dissertation, asserting that the behaviour of 16th-19th century monarchs, "explorers", and settlers meets the DSM-5 criteria for sociopathy (ASPD) and that white supremacy is simply a manifestation of the disorder, as it is known to have genetic factors .

me: this is precisely why it's important to teach postmodernism widely and not just for a select few, we end up ascribing ideological aspects to physical traits or personal deficiencies because we have little appreciation for how powerful beliefs and narratives can be. you don't need genes to explain a history of human beings justifying being awful to one another, and those people doing horrible things don't even need to be assholes or sociopaths or evil. many of the biggest tragedies in history were caused by good but misguided intentions borne out of a warped world view.

I absolutely get that. Many "good" people have gone along with horrible things because it was dangerous to go against the flow, or personally convenient, or popular. Lately, maybe because there's a poem coming, I've been reading about European royal families and the degree of generational intermarriage. There are well documented stories about the effects of inbreeding, the Habsburg jaw, hemophilia, etc. Why not the cognitive issues, mental illness and the rest of the potential delays and disorders? These are the people whose worldview got us here. They funded the "exlplorations", had flags planted in their names, and still have their faces on our money. At best, they and their issues were complicit in how we got here through direct or indirect manipulation. At worst, the world's order has been formed by the ideas of sociopaths that then trended and now have a body count in the millions. If we just ask the question, who has killed the most people on the planet, there are clear numbers. Why not look at the source of that genocidal behaviour through a different lens? It's a question. Badness can be bred or born. Both can have influence over large numbers of people.

me: the monarchs and explorers, whatever else may have been wrong with them individually, were products of their time. if you look at the history of genocides in europe, you can make an argument that europeans are a sociopathic and genocidal race. if you look at the history of genocides in africa, you can make that same argument about africans. the idea of exploration is as old as we are (it's how the native americans got there in the first place), same as conquest. what made that behaviour so popular in those centuries was technological advances that enabled it, not sudden psychopathies, and the winners of that era (in particular the british) didn't win because they were somehow worse people, or better people... they won because they had the right tools, the right strategies and a fair amount of luck*
there are plenty of mental disorders that have physical causes, but the behaviours you're describing aren't the product of anything physical, they're caused by good ol' human nature. and that behaviour isn't all good or all bad, it's filled with grey areas. what aspects you pay attention to are dictated by your own ideology, and how you interpret any data you might come across as well. clear numbers don't tell any particular story until you drill down deep into their context.
* if you're interested, one of the most fascinating non-fiction books i've ever read is max boot's "war made new", in which on of the many topics he covers is the naval advances that led to successful british conquest.

Of course there have been genocides all over the world. The difference is that Europe exported theirs for enormous capital gains and murdered and empoverished people all over the planet, particularly the people who look least like them. The idea of race is a creation, but who created it and why? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should, better tools or not. Again, back to the original post. If we look at the colonial mentality as pathological, some might be less likely to accept all of the manifest destiny BS and call it what it was, so we can get on with the business of making things right, and healing the damage, instead of pretending it didn't happen and telling folks to get over it.

me: pretending it didn't happen and telling folks to get over it isn't right, but finding a DSM category for that behaviour isn't going to fix things or help with the healing. colonizers colonized because they stood to gain immensely, but racism isn't confined to colonizers and it's not confined to any one race or set of races. the europeans did horrible things because their ideologies justified it and they could get away with it, not because they were europeans (as opposed to any other race) and not because they were mentally ill.
"the idea of race is a creation" - that's technically true, but it's an organic idea that comes out of seeing differences and having brains that categorize by stereotype and otherness. there's no one race that can take responsibility for racism or xenophobia, it's totally natural, just as it's natural that in every battle or contention one side will win or another. that doesn't make the winner "right", and it's important to teach our kids not to use mental shortcuts like racism (another thing that should be taught to everyone), but to blame any one race for all racism is absurdly racist.
if we want to heal the damage, we need to start by acknowledging what we've done, understanding why we've done it (which is why postmodernism studies are so very important), and then learn how to behave better than our instincts and our ancestors. the first step to achieving that is cognitive contamination, sharing culture and learning to communicate across ideological boundaries. that's hard work, extremely hard work, especially if you're coming from the side of the victim, but it's a war worth waging and every individual win makes you more powerful (which is why so many racists are so defensive these days). what's amazing to me is that we all tend to focus on the bad news and pay relatively little attention to the positive side of things (because we're biologically wired to do that), but if you look at the general state of the world as far as ignorance and racism and homophobia and xenophobia etc are concerned, and compare it to the world twenty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago, you'll see that our ideas are evolving pretty dramatically since we all connected over the internet and things are actually improving. there will always be bigots and assholes and sociopaths, but they're fast becoming pariahs in global culture and the more we all keep talking and posting the more ideas of equality and compassion and mutual respect will become mainstream.

there is no blaming of one race here, only the desire to call a thing a thing, finally, after 500 years of gaslighting. If the exploration of the conquest mentality that brought us here sheds brighter light on the path forward, I think it's worth it. The way my ancestors have been seen and depicted needs to change too. I just want all of the lies to end. As for guilt, if the shoe fits...let folks wear it, and then do something about it. Guilt alone does nothing. If there was no focus on the good, none of us would be here anymore. We'd have died of broken hearts ages ago. We can focus on the good and acknowledge the bad. Maybe we just do that differently.

me: i 100% agree with what you're looking for, all i'm saying is that you're not going to find it with a DSM label. in a way, a DSM label would do more harm than good as it would excuse bad behavior as an unavoidable consequence of a mental illness rather than what it was, and continues to be: borne of choices we make and ideologies we can be educated out of

press my buttons

go on. do it.

i tried to back out of being harassed on reddit:

you might be surprised to learn that your opinion, based purely on a few lines of text written in a reddit thread, is missing a whole lot of facts and nuances that provide context. honestly, as enticing as it may be to respond with all the details, i don't feel that this is going to be a constructive endeavour as you're clearly not interested in learning anything that might change your mind, so i hope it's okay with the gods of the internets that i walk away from this encounter.

but the asshole was insistent. so i responded as follows:

damn, you're unpleasant - i'd love to have a chat with you face-to-face, see how ugly your behavior is when you're faced with potential consequences.

1. my wife has character, agency and backbone, we discuss everything and we debate constantly. you might not know this, but it is actually possible to convince people with data and by setting an example (until she got pregnant and needed me around more, i was in MMA training and in incredible physical shape... now i've been out of the gym for a few years and i'm just in good shape)

2. the tension during pregnancy was due to the fact that she insisted on eating things that are known to harm a foetus in utero. seafood, in particular - with the amount of mercury having long surpassed all safety limits, children whose mothers eat seafood during pregnancy are born with significantly smaller brains. pardon me if protecting my child's future cognitive abilities took priority over keeping the peace. i learned over the course of the pregnancy how to share data and then keep my opinions to myself, and we figured shit out, which is what responsible, mature adults do.

our son has two parents, i'm not just a sperm donor.

3. by the time our son was born i did not insist on him being vegan, and sadly that decision led to him developing a life-threatening dairy allergy. no, soy milk is not a replacement for breast feeding or formula. neither is cow's milk, so that's a strange twist you've got going on there. soy formula is as nutritious and much safer than dairy, but my wife chose to supplement breastfeeding with dairy initially until she realized there was a problem and from that point he became a soy-formula kid for the months it took for her to be able to breastfeed exclusively*. which was fine. i pretty much left her alone with the solid food decisions when the time came, until she eventually had her "ah-ha!" moment. once she understood that there was nothing in animal products that he couldn't get more and better from plants, that was when SHE decided that we should all be vegan. some important information that she learned in those documentaries were a part of that "ah-ha!" moment. if incorporating new facts into your life is "brainwashing", well, that's your problem.

* and because you're so *good* with parsing what i write, i feel like i need to specify here that she had a *really* hard time breastfeeding to the point where *i* was encouraging her to give it up, but she insisted and persisted and courageously pulled through

4. we have had excellent pediatricians, and we regularly do blood-work and check in with dietitians to ensure that we aren't missing anything. i came to veganism through a desire to learn - i was actually anti-vegan when i started reading research papers on nutrition because i began my journey with a b12 deficiency (on a decidedly animal-based diet) - and it was only after i realized that the more i followed an evidence-based diet the more plant-based it became that i was able to let go of the cognitive dissonance surrounding our food choices and started becoming vegan.
like most parents we care deeply about our son's health and welfare, and while he's the only vegan in his last three preschool classes he's usually among the biggest, toughest and most active. he's also really smart, constantly impressing his teachers and other parents, so i don't think we're completely failing.

5. if you're going to call the aforementioned documentaries brainwashing, i suggest you take a step back and consider where all your dietary information is coming from. who's informing you? who's informing your doctors? we've all been brainwashed by about a century of marketing, we have to train our kids to deal with the dissonance of eating animals that we'd otherwise befriend, and watching my non-vegan friends deal with these issues with their own kids has been eye-opening. it's easier to teach compassion when you're not being a hypocrite.

next time you're reading an article demonizing plant-based diets and promoting animal products, do yourself a favor: check the sources. and when you read the sources, read the abstract, and the conclusion, and then look at how the study was done. you might actually learn something.

antizionists vs the jews

"Criticizing the state of Israel is not hostility to or prejudice against Jews, therefore not Anti-Semitic BY DEFINITION. But yall really keep trying it."

that very much depends on whether you're listening to both sides of the story, and very much on who's telling it. i lived in israel for twelve years, a couple of those with palestinians, and i've learned that even on the ground relatively few people know what's actually going on and it's a phenomenally complex and nuanced situation. if all the criticism is flowing in only one direction, well, then the bias is telling. nobody yelling "free palestine" is actually doing the palestinians any favours, all that does is inspire more fighting and prevent more talking.

"there's so much to unpack here. Prevent more talking? Like the "inciting" laws that prevent free speech for Palestinians? Inspire more fighting? Like illegal settlements in the West Bank? If you're not speaking actively and outwardly against those things, whose bias. Is showing?
We say Free Palestine because Palestinians aren't free. In their own land. To self determine. I know what apartheid looks like. I know what oppression looks like. And speaking out against those policies doesn't equate to anti-semitism. Unless of course you're intertwining oppression and Judaism, which would be wild."

you say you know what apartheid looks like, as a south african born under apartheid let me tell you that comparing the situation there to apartheid is unbelievably insulting to the africans that suffered under actual apartheid.

the only time that comparison becomes at all fathomable is by denying that the state of israel has the right to exist. and following that line, you would have to be denying that the jews made multiple attempts to peaceably divide the country from 1928 through to the independence war. we won that war, and those "palestinians" who remained became "israeli arabs" and have civil rights just like any other israeli. those who fled, or were chased out (the stories aren't always so clear), were not accepted as refugees by their countries of origin (egypt and jordan, primarily), and have been deliberately forced to maintain their refugee status by the arab nations because it has suited them to exploit these people as a weapon against israel. UNRWA was invented to maintain the palestinians' refugee status, not to help them get on with their lives (which is pretty messed up if you think about it).

so back to the point, if you're calling israel an "apartheid state" then you're including the palestinian territories (gaza and the west bank) as a part of israel, which they're not. they're under PA and hamas control, not israeli control, which means that israelis would be the dumbest people on the planet to let them pass through israeli borders unchecked. and i've heard stories from troops on the border that would make you cry for both sides.

let's be very clear that i do not in any way, shape or form think that situation is okay. let's be very clear, i personally believe that the palestinians are the most ****ed over people on the planet. the only thing is, what's doing them over isn't the israelis - though the gods know israel is not helping their situation nor the israelis' by reacting to every terrorist instigation rather than trying to find out-of-the-box solutions for such a complex situation - israel is well within its moral rights to defend its citizens, and the palestinians are not israeli citizens.

myself, and what i estimate to be the vast majority of israelis, do not want settlements, we want peace, we want dialog, we want solutions. many, if not most palestinians want peace with israel and to get on with their lives. but we're all at the mercy of a number of factors.

1. the palestinians aren't just at the mercy of their leadership, which in turn is at the mercy of rich, terrible entities that fund them and don't give a damn about anything other than the destruction of the jews, they're at the mercy of decades of training to be weapons of hate against israel. we've heard countless stories - and i've met some refugees personally - of people who've been taught to hate israel and the jews from birth and who enter the country and discover that it's all lies. there are plenty of palestinians who know what's going on, but they also know that if they dare to open their mouths the palestinian "leadership" will drag them through the streets, execute them, and make their families suffer.

2. the israelis generally want peace, but as proud as they are of their democracy it's been corrupt as **** since the 90's and their leadership are pretty clueless. except for netanyahu, who's a very shrew POS who's conned a magnificent political game, and with his (what i believe should be illegal) tactical coalition governments has managed to give power to the hard-right minority who are causing almost as much damage to the israeli populace as they are to palestinian relations - those are the settlers and their supporters.

3. after decades of terrorism, israelis have become convinced that palestinians "love death" and cannot be negotiated with. they cannot empathize with the palestinians, and you probably wouldn't want to either if you lived in perpetual fear of them. but imagine if you had the choice of a really shitty life, or of ending it quickly with a violent act and securing for family for a little while. what would you choose?

neither the palestinians nor the israelis trust each other, and although there are some wonderful initiatives happening at a grassroots level there're certainly not enough. it doesn't help that both sides culturally are very proud, and very stubborn. we could work to increase these initiatives, but the media and court of public opinion prefers to put all blame squarely on the israelis shoulders which makes these positive sorts of things harder to pull off.

---

on a personal level, i've been speaking out against the settlements for decades now, very few people i know are misguided enough to support them. the settlements make me angry, dude, and i've been hit with tear gas for protesting them. regarding "incitement", don't be confused by BS. palestinians and israeli-arabs can and do say whatever they damned well please, as long as its against israel. the real punishment comes when they speak out against their own organizations, you look that up and tell me you're cool with what those people are subjected to.

btw, i've also served in the army, and i can guarantee you that military indoctrination is to be as ethical as possible and to avoid both physical and psychological harm to anyone who is not a clear aggressor. while that leads to an distasteful conversation that we can have about units who do not adhere to army doctrine, i can vouch from the inside that by and large israel and israelis have no malicious intent towards the palestinians and just want this crap to be over. you would not believe the lengths to which hamas has to go to increase casualties whenever some kind of action is being taken, it's literally mind-boggling.

personally, i believe that israel would serve the palestinians and themselves best if they *would* give the palestinians the right of return, the palestinians would definitely be a lot better off. but because israel is a "proud democracy" we would immediately lose our jewish homeland due to numbers. so we'd have to ditch modern democracy and figure out some other system, which would be such a controversial move that i can't imagine that ever happening. any other constructive solutions always welcome.

---

so all that said, you're totally right to criticize settlements. but if you're not criticizing the arab nations (via hamas and the PA) for their part, that sounds like a pretty serious bias to me. everyone seems to care so much about the actions of a tiny jewish state, which is serving as a wonderful distraction from the humanitarian disaster that surrounds it. if people really cared about the palestinians, they'd care about solving the problems and not carrying on down the same, well-worn paths we've been fighting on for most of a century.

and if you're only criticizing israel, well, then, one has to be fair and look at what that tiny nation represents. because it's the jewish homeland, and when push comes to shove we really don't have anywhere else to go. if you're not part of the solution...

why climate change matters

"I have been to many talks at UCT about this topic and every time the same thing happens, they leave out any natural impacts from the sea, clouds, decaying forests, volcanoes, insects, animals and only tend to blame humans. Their conclusions are always the same, end fossil fuel and the world will be a better place, yet they do not give any alternatives. They go on about how the polar ice caps are melting and have never been this defrosted ever, yet if you watch what is happening in Siberia and the Yamal peninsula gas pockets are being formed from decaying animals which were caught in these ice shelves. Now if the ice levels have never been this low in history, then how did animals get trapped in them? I do research in alternative fuels and even with all the billions of funding, the highest percentage it could enter is around 10-15%...so a country still needs something else to take up the slack and every country ends up taking fossil fuel. In fact the trend for coal use globally is on the increase and there is no evidence in sight to show any decrease soon. Even if we were to stop fossil fuel use, the CO2 being produced by nature will still so called negatively impact the world, just at slower rate...but destroy the world in eventuality...or so they say. These climatologists cannot even predict an earthquake, yet they can for sure predict the end of the world, without real tangible evidence. Mars is more evidence of this, Mars according to geologists once had a favourable environment for humans, yet without 1 human or without fossil fuel it destroyed itself! Look at Saturn, astronomers are noticing that its rings are disappearing....without humans and without fossil fuel...all by natural progression. Imagine if this climate change could do a 180 and then we all sit together to find real solutions, maybe there are ways of making fossil fuel cleaner or safer? Imagine putting the billions that go to alternative energy and do not produce significant progress to projects within the fossil fuel industry which were sidelined due to funding problems. While we all flow towards alternative energy...all we have got is higher energy prices, higher vehicle prices, higher transport costs. Have you noticed while civilian fuel prices go up and up, jet fuel has been going down down down and yet the cost of flying is still going up and up. Let us look at Al Gore, his carbon foot print is so huge, you would not expect him to be the climate change activist of climate change activists....then you also have China who cares less. If everyone does not have the buy in then you will fail. I read yesterday that the Chinese built a waste to energy plant in Ethiopia....a little more investigation found that the plant started being built in Sept 2014 and using an obsolete emission standard which expired in July 2014 I think. Yet there was an updated version from 2010...which begs the question why did they not use the more stringent emission standard and went for an obsolete version instead? It is a rhetorical question, had they built the factory according to the new standard it probably would have been illegal to build it. In conclusion, I do not say that I do not believe that the climate is changing, however I do believe that this issue is not as serious as politicians make it out to be, because the world has been in this situation before and managed to have spectacular ice ages and survived thousands of years after them...There was an expedition to the Arctic to study the levels of ice there, the scientists employed the strongest icebreaker in the world, they predicted the voyage would get to their destination in record time because the ice was very thin....in the end, the ice was so thick, the research had to be abandoned...How about that egg in the face and this research had got funding on the grandest scale. There are too many holes in the climate change topic and even the professors who come talk admit it....I feel socialism and communism would make matters so much worse."

it's absolutely correct to say that the climate changes and has changed without us. that doesn't mean that industrialized humans haven't enormously influenced the rate of change, and we have more evidence than we need to demonstrate that. it's easy to pinpoint fossil fuel as a large contributor, but there are problems with that which you've pointed out; however, looking at the prices of things doesn't mean much because a lot more than fuel costs need to be factored in.
getting off fossil fuel is nice in theory, but solar, wind and biofuel are not really viable alternatives as you've pointed out. hydro, geothermal and nuclear, on the other hand, are more than capable of doing the job, and the tiny risks associated with nuclear are absolutely worth the efficiency of energy output we'd get.

it's also not true that getting off fossil fuel alone will be sufficient, as we have as much if not more influence coming from animal agriculture, and all of that combined with a whole lot of other things which include an horrific quantity of food waste being stored in garbage dumps, ocean acidification and depletion, and a reliance on unrecyclable rare metals for our tech parts.

it's also true that we've had worse climates in history, but there's a fundamental difference causing the concern for the current trend: we weren't around when those animals were trapped way back when, and as adaptable as we are humans beings are not capable of adapting to the coming changes "en masse". a heck of a lot of us will die. mostly in wars over resources like water - which if you recall is what began all the trouble in syria.

the planet will survive whatever comes, and it'll most likely re-equalize at some point in the future. human beings? unless we slow this down dramatically or get off the planet, we're toast. we might survive in pockets of mad-max-like hunter-gatherer tribalism, but all the wonderful things that make us so amazing? we'll lose them, and as far as we know we're the most advanced species this universe has produced.

even if all this was some political conspiracy - which is so outside of the realm of the possibility that it's almost funny - not aiming for sustainability is simply not intelligent behaviour. a big part of evolution is optimization, and since industrial consumerism took hold a century ago we've been devolving into a species of wastefulness, ignorance and isolation.

i don't know what socialism and communism have to do with anything, i'm an anarcho-capitalist and i'm pretty confident that my political ideology has little to do with how i'll fare during civil war and surviving in the wilderness. i'm also fairly sure that all the wonderful tech and knowledge we've been developing ever since we started farming is worth saving. i also don't think there're enough politicians anywhere who have enough of a handle on the situation to turn us around without a fight.

this whole "debate" misses one important thing. we live on a tiny planet, it's the only one we can survive on (until we manage to escape), and there's a fundamental principle that most of us learn early on goes something along the lines of "don't poop on your own step"... or more accurately, "in your own drinking water". we are long overdue in applying this principle to how we treat our environment, none of us are immune from the shit-storm that's coming.

on gender identity and transitioning

scrapper just posted a link to a very, very long article on the state of transitioning research. fortunately, he advised me to skip to the conclusion and it pretty much summarizes what i've come across of late.

from what i've read i've begun to believe that "educating" children about gender is not only unnecessary but confusing to them, and that both encouraging (more than just accepting how your kids feel) and discouraging (just accept how your kids feel) are both forms of abuse. if there's a serious body dysmorphia issue when they're older, then make sure they have the support (family and professional) that they need.

what we really need is to - as a society - stop caring about an individual's gender preferences and behaviours. seriously, who the **** cares if a boy or girl behaves like the opposite sex or what kids wear or any of that crap. constructing identity based on these kinds of things is precisely why we have such messed up identity politics in the first place.

build your identity on things that matter, like values and principles and tastes, and let's move the **** on! as gd says: it's time to step out of the anal phase.

racism online

why am i getting into debates online about racism?

i was asked for my opinion on this article entitled 100 ways white people can make life less frustrating for people of color and wrote the following:

some of it i agree with 100%, some of it is silly and some of it is overtly racist. one of the biggest reliefs i've experienced since returning to south africa was working in a company where i was part of a white minority of peers, being able to have healthy interracial relations without the marxist left politics overshadowing every interaction and making people disconnect. people were happy to laugh at differences and have real dialogue, which is not what's happening in the rest of the west. not that things are perfect in this country, there's plenty of racism from all walks of life, but it doesn't have to be everywhere and run / ruin everything. i actually just watched a very interesting breakdown on white privilege and intersectionality by jordan peterson in which he makes the amazing point that intersectionality taken to its logical extreme shuts down the foundation of its own argument, i recommend giving it a watch: white privilege isn't real

at the end of the day, people need to learn to be respectful to people who are different to them and to be fair to everyone. anything more or less than that is wrong. there's plenty of systemic racism (see Filming Cops if you don't believe it) but fighting it with a different kind of racism is counterproductive. if you're privileged, use that privilege to make the world a better and more just place for everyone, but feeling guilty or acting purely out of guilt for being privileged in one aspect or another isn't helping anyone.

my opinion was challenged, and so i broke it down:

i don't believe the current state is "good enough", but i also don't believe that the way people are trying to fix things is going to make it any better. if anything, things are becoming worse as more and more white people are feeling shut out of the conversation and stop making any effort, in particular those who weren't and aren't already allied to anti-racism. it's divisive, and divisive isn't good. but that's just my white opinion, right?

i did read the list, let's exhaustively go through the items.

1-5, 7-10: 100%
6: meaningless
11: i don't know what "rinse" means, but cultural appropriation is a positive thing and trying to stop it is divisive. cultural appropriation is a form of cultural evolution and it works both ways.
12: that's not a race thing, it's a being a dick thing. i'm fairly certain it doesn't fall under "things white people do", but if it does then i agree
13-15: 100%
16: questioning anyone's blackness or whiteness is wrong regardless of your race. don't do it if you're white, don't do it if you're black.
17: this is a logical trap to ensure that white people can't be a part of a conversation on race. "shut your mouth, oppressor!" is not making things better.
18, 19: that's treating somebody of a different race as a "man on the inside", which is covered in points 1-10
20: inversely treating people as representatives of their race
21-23, 25, 26, 28: 100%
24: maybe, but also make sure to read up on psychology, philosophy and literary theory that isn't race-bound
27, 29, 32, 33: support art and projects you like, don't support something on principle because it's non-white. make sure you're not only exposed to all-white art and projects, THAT'S important.
30. it depends on what that means, if it's using something "culturally apporpriated" in a positive way it's fine, if it's making a joke of another culture that's different.
31. 100%
35: this is a long conversation, but in summary i don't agree
36, 37: what has this got to do with anything?
38: it's reasonable to expect immigrants to follow the rules of the dominant culture. if you don't like the rules of a dominant culture, move somewhere else. there's a difference between not letting people trample on your freedoms and on imposing your way of life on others.
39, 40: 100%
41: by race, 100%. by culture, factually incorrect. islam is inherently more homophobic than western society. russians are white, they're more homophobic than americans.
42-44: i don't know why this is in the list, but sure, okay.
45, 46: this isn't about racism, it's about being a dick. it's like thinking you have the right to touch a pregnant woman's belly. except if you're in a relationship with a woman of color, in which case don't assume that your partner is "woke" and just tell them not to touch your damned hair.
47: make sure you have whatever you need when you sleep over at a partner's home, this is not a race thing.
48: sure
49: again, the example is a cultural one not a race one. but sure.
50: silly, but whatever.
51-54, 56-58: 100%
55: do what you can with what you have
59: 100%, but the solutions are often societal ones and not personal which is not implied in this point.
60, 64: interesting, it certainly depends on the context but i generally agree
61, 63. 100%
62: rubbish.
65,66: that's one point, and the point is "be fair"
67: i heartily disagree. if you have something to say you should be able to say it and be argued with. simple.
68. which situations? oh, when you want to have a conversation?
69-75 100%
76: i don't know what ICE is
77: depends on how you define islamophobia, and that's a LONG conversation and not for the faint of heart.
78, 79, 81: 100%
80: *sigh* really? all of it, or just the fact that those kinds of racists are real?
82, 83 back to cultural appropriation, it's a ridiculous and divisive idea that we shouldn't celebrate things we like in other cultures. pull the other one.
84: i just did, go ahead and block me if you're afraid of confronting uncomfortable ideas
85 100%, unless it's done in a way that highlights its wrongness, like in bamboozled or tropic thunder
86: don't sing along to our rap songs? no. but don't use the word unless you're actually talking about the word itself. see louis ck on "the n-word", he's on point.
87: yay! let's whitewash history by rewriting historical texts like huckleberry finn! seriously, this is a dangerously stupid idea.
88. sure
89: and a bunch of other reasons, but those certainly contributed. not really relevant.
90: i dunno, i think it's okay to care about race whenever it's relevant, just like every other issue we have to deal with.
91: does anyone actually do that?!
92: again, when relevant. people of color shouldn't have to, so let's move towards a reality in which they don't instead of one in which we all have to be uncomfortable all the time.
93, 96: please watch that video i posted earlier from before.
94: 100%
95: first make sure that the white person in question hasn't experienced racism, because we're not all the same. being shut out of a conversation because you're white is racism. full stop.
97: sure thing
98: 100%
99: that's phrasing of a very particular ideology of victimhood that's only accurate to a point, but i agree with the intention
100: 100%

i invested so much time in that response that i had to post it her for posterity. you're welcome.