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@KesterR Profile picture
@KesterR
@KesterRatcliff
postgrad student interested in poetry's effects on society using computational methods and aiming to make tools to strengthen global civil society.
Dec 20 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
I really shouldn't be doing anything other than my thesis project until 21 Jan, but I wish someone would write something easy to read for many people and in Arabic about how internalized coloniality and reactive identity formation influence Secularism and Islamism. References 🧵 Sadiq Jalal al-Azm: explored how some Islamist movements, in their opposition to Western imperialism, internalize and replicate the structures and ideologies they resist. His critiques focused on the paradoxes of cultural and ideological transference.historicalmaterialism.org/figure/sadiq-j…
Dec 14 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
@nytopinion @NafeesHamid Another aspect of exclusion is contempt. I think contempt is more about social epistemic choices. After deciding to hold someone in contempt, everything they might say is preemptively rejected, they're assumed to be impossible to reason or cooperate with. There's no going back. @nytopinion @NafeesHamid I think there are appropriate cases for contempt, but it should be very nearly a last resort. Contempt reactions are becoming far too common and casually decided on, often more out of projection and in-group hyperreality than appropriate to the target(s).
Dec 7 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Militarily overthrowing the Assad regime is great. Hamdullah. And Syrian society clearly has grown out of some of the regime's sociocultural conditioning over the last 13 years - cooperating with people we don't fully agree with, even empathising with why enemies became so... Prioritising creating a better future for everyone, not prioritising retribution on most of those who caused harm.... Most were manipulated misinformed afraid and multiple kinds of stupid rather than essentially or unchangeably evil. Change the circumstances and most will change.
Oct 31 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I'm grateful for Noura expressing the disagreement so clearly and without projecting malicious intentions. I don't agree with the premise that people arguing for voting for the lesser evil imagine that Dems haven't been participating in normalisation of fascist political culture but it's helpful to have that disagreement on whether that's a premise of the argument for choosing the minimum possible harms we can at this point clarified.

Maybe some people do Romantically project onto the Dems that they haven't been participating in the slide into fascism,
Oct 31 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
It's still kind of incredible that we're in 2024, living under states which claim to be democratic and maybe 60% are, if you account for values as well as procedures and foreign policies as well as domestic, in the midst of a global polycrisis with no adequate planning yet, and our governments and most of the institutional elites decided the way to conserve stability is to almost unconditionally and with no real material limits back up a clearly fascist government obviously doing genocide and expansionist war of aggression and undermine what was left of
Aug 6 • 34 tweets • 7 min read
it's frustrating that we keep on repeating the 'shocked, shocked I tell you!' reaction to people we already know are on the pseudo-populist to fascist spectrum expressing social perceptions which use facts from outside their in-group only secondarily, selectively & instrumentally It's a pattern, and it has been around, repeating everyday and becoming more common, for many years already. You can keep pointing and reacting to each particular instance, but that's not going to change it. To change it, first you need to understand why it is.
Jul 23 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
European 'Enlightentment' culture biases us to talk and perceive as if conscious reflective thinking is much more common than it actually is. This is a huge source of systematic errors in understanding and reactions. Social perception is much more common than individual thinking. And perception, including social perception, is by default unconscious. Like how you don't need to consciously pay attention to your process of perception of where your bicycle brake levers are to use them, but you can consciously attend to that perception process. We rarely do..
Jun 6 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Haldane's principle could also be a testable hypothesis. It'd be quite difficult to get a systematic representative sample or to collect all the relevant data, but we could do a lot better than unsystematically guessing 'they look forward to...' or it's entirely due to stupidity. Of course if we really looked systematically for real primary data about the question and coordinated all the evidence available, I think we'd find that it's not simply all a coordinated conspiracy nor all due to various kinds of stupidity, it's some of both, but...
Jun 5 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is true but I think it misses the level at which we need to object to have the best chance of convincing people WHY the law is or was set up this way. Just saying "it's legal" doesn't connect to people's moral emotions and intuitions, unless people already understand why. The post-WW2 international legal system was motivated by enough people having seen the consequences and implications of not having such moral philosophical assumptions and laws to codify the basic intuitions of inherent human dignity and universal human moral reasonableness.
May 22 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
is there anyone or any org in a sufficiently high position in the hierarchy to potentially get listened to organising opposition to the trend of Western chauvinism undermining & risking the societal moral cohesion of Western societies & the democratising of digital global space? I think the coalition around Western chauvinism or loyalty to the imaginary community of peers and the 'West over the rest' norm is mainly because people don't really think personally about what they're socially participating in and don't think through the long-term implications.
May 6 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
A highly deserved demise:
"these elections have only confirmed that the Conservatives are heading for the electoral equivalent of the Chicxulub asteroid impact (except this time one or two dinosaurs might survive)" conservativehome.com/2024/05/05/goo… If the "Conservative" party (actually constitutionally destructive cynically amoral nihilists) is finished in the next 4-5 years and the LibDems take their place as the main right of centre party in the UK, that'd be a very good thing for the UK and its influence on the world.
May 3 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I look forward to the day hopefully in my lifetime when the @Conservatives party will finally close down as an organisation and end. It has no beneficial part in any decent future for the UK. We have no need of lying, cruel, amoral, nihilistic politicians.
independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi… @Conservatives They utterly and abysmally fail at Chesterton's Gate parable of principled conservatism - they are destroying constitutional foundations of liberal democracy (universal human rights, legal rationality) without even bothering to understand their purpose or what they were made for.
Apr 5 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
@civictechguide We might be looking at what 'civic' means from different perspectives. I don't necessarily assume it has to be directly connected to an already existing civil society org in the current system of institutions. I mean more that the structure of the thing is inherently apt for @civictechguide supporting the kind of relationships which occur in 'civil society' and strengthening that kind of social network topologically in the whole multi- digital environment ('multi-platform') global social network (or network of networks), so that it grows strong enough
Mar 28 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
@Cabooner @KlDGUDl Re. 21) I don't see a big moral problem with targeting Iranian or Assad regime military targets in Syria, altho I get it why it's incl in the list. What's worse about their influence in Syria is that the US gov chose to actively intervene *against* the Syrian revolution @Cabooner @KlDGUDl partly because the Israeli gov believes that having the Assad regime as a neighbour is less risky for them than having an Arab-majority democratic government as a neighbour on that border would be. So the USG blocked the FSA receiving any potentially adequate air defense weapons,
Mar 26 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
now I've thought of it it seems so obvious I can't unsee it: the link between populist authoritarianism and strategic xenophobia is that the obsessive xenophobia is instrumental in a strategy to shift a society's moral system to authoritarianism, because in authoritarian morality the locus of moral comparison is 'up' the hierarchy, judgement is primarily relative to authorities, 'morality' condescends from an authority's 'right' to be arbitrary, which at the top is absolute, and that establishes the whole system of arbitrary hierarchical power relations.
Mar 21 • 34 tweets • 6 min read
Thought while biking yesterday: one way AI Doomerism deludes us is by omitting, or overwhelming with noise, info about the range of what's possible, leading to a design monopoly on a v narrow range of what AI could be. To judge what should be, first we need to know what could be. A necessary part of ethical analysis of current big commercial AI developments is comparing them to what we can realistically enough imagine AI could, be in a range of possible & desirable futures, & therefore how, then how much, they're falling short relative to that higher good
Mar 16 • 36 tweets • 7 min read
the #RefugeesWelcome volunteers movement in 2016 was 3x bigger in number of citizens than the populist-nationalists, but the European Commission chose to go with the pop-nats' demands and has doubled-down on that ever since, under @vonderleyen, ignoring @Europarl_EN @EP_Justice @vonderleyen is up for re-election this year, probably in July. If everything goes as normal, she'll be re-elected smoothly.

She's made the EU's border violence regime much worse & expanded the policy of commissioning extraterritorial refoulement services
Nov 2, 2023 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
If I use the most well-known word for it, half of the academic field of CommSci will ridicule + dismiss it & me, so I'll just describe it: In this mass+social multi-media environment now, our individual samples of information are biased in a statistical sense by network effects. This is not the same thing as saying that a network overall, on all topics, over time, has a polarised network structure or topology. The best philosophical clarification on this controversy is by C. Nguyen.
Apr 29, 2021 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
“Everyone has the right to leave
any country, including his own"

UDHR 13.2; ECHR Protocol 4 Art.2; ICCPR Article 12.2.

CoE summary of the right to leave in international law: coe.int/t/commissioner… The right to leave a country can only lawfully be limited by other people's more serious human rights and needs, such as the right to security in a time of war, or just as much as necessary for public health protection in a time of a life-threatening pandemic.
Sep 3, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
@Arundhati_Roy33 hey :) I'm nobody important, but I used to be a fan of yours, read many of your books, said you were my favorite author in job interviews. I admired how you wove the subtleties of empathy breaking through despite class/caste hierarchies and abuses into stories. Much of the criticism of US foreign policies and what they've done when it wasn't a policy but more just careless incompetence is valid, but the USG and its allies and client regimes is not the only axis of imperialism or violent political oppression for exploitation.
Feb 20, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
a week later this is still on my mind. Correct me now if I'm wrong before I repeat this view for the rest of my life: If Obama had not decided to tacitly intervene to protect the Syrian regime the revolution would have succeeded. While Assadists will continue repeating the "regime change conspiracy" line because it's an effective propaganda tactic, the opposite is in fact true- opendemocracy.net/en/north-afric…

The USG's main interventions in Syria protected the regime- eternispring.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/a-g…