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.

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.

@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

@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,

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.

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

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

https://twitter.com/MigControl/status/1767123067988279806

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.

“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…

https://twitter.com/msehlisafa/status/1387387290939441155

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.

@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.

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.

https://twitter.com/tobiaschneider/status/1228310771169472512

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…

One thing I've learned in the last year is- extremely little and few of people's misjudgements are due to bad intentions, almost all of our misjudgements are due to ignorance, and, what's much worse, ignorance of the extent of our ignorance.. and how we inevitably live with more or less statistical sampling biases due to having singular positions in dynamic and quite modular networks of information distribution + circulation

I'd now guess/ estimate that bad will as a factor in misjudgements in general is about 2%

sadly I believe that relatively few Syrians breaking across the Turkish border and increasingly arriving on Greek shores is more likely to get European mainstream attention than many Syrians being killed daily by the regime, bc of collective objectification of foreigners/ racism. that means we *and the Assadist international* have an opportunity now to reach the mainstream audience who usually aren't paying attention so are unreachable most of the time. also means that their bridging-nodes are more likely to be activated, and more exposed to discrediting

@TwitterSupport this is inciting fear or hatred of a Protected Category of persons, because: context of this tweet is islamophobic stereotyping against the WH, using the fact that majority are Sunni Muslims to pretend that they're associated with terrorism.

https://twitter.com/Underground_RT/status/1097917932913479683

It doesn't explicitly say "hate them because they're Muslims" but if you look at the context around this particular tweet, it's clearly relying on and reinforcing anti-Muslim bias and hatred and it's harassing the WH using the fact most are Muslims to mobilize mass trolling.