Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 10-Oct-2026 10:08:14 JST 
simsa03
In my siding with Israel in her fight against Hamas, the PA, and the Islamists, I haven't been oblivious to the plight of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip or the "West Bank", be they supporters of the terrorists or not. I just refuse to let myself be blackmailed emotionally by the terrorists who chose their plight (as the plight of the Israelis) as a weapon of war. As I still see no reason whatsoever to reward Hamas for leading their own people to the slaughter. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 10-Oct-2026 05:16:43 JST
simsa03
The mightiest weapon of Hamas, the PA, and the Islamists is the suffering of the Palestinian people and the public relations the terrorists base on it. Because every time Israel fights back, it is instantaneously accused worldwide of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
One can see this successful mechanism in full swing in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to no-one other than Navi Pillay. Whatever her achievements elsewhere, she called the war in Gaza a genocide and Israeli politicians of inciting genocide. The terrorists won again.
The mechanics of this weapon is diabolic: Israel is allowed to defend herself (as everyone claims) but if she does, she is called a genocidal state. That is: Israel is theoretically but not practically allowed to defend herself and her citizens while the Palestinians can mount atrocities on atrocities.
People should keep that in mind before they reflexively cheer the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay. They are supporting the PR campaigns of Hamas, the PA, and the Islamists. And reward and strengthen terrorists. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 08-Oct-2026 04:35:55 JST
simsa03
Today I went to our local synagogue to bring flowers. On arrival I found one small bouquet at the entrance. One. As if the despair and the pain of this day weren't enough, but that this despair and pain are not even seen and acknowledged, that is dreadful and harrowing. One bouquet. Now two. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 05-Oct-2026 03:36:33 JST
simsa03
In an interview https://youtube.com/watch?v=P-5Bu7vTOXc with Haviv Rettig Gur, Gadi Taub gives a splendid explanation and defence of Netanyahu's politics and conduct of the war(s) since 2023. Recommended. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 03-Oct-2026 23:15:07 JST
simsa03
To put it simple: Every knowing system needs a body and a temporal-spatial environment to act in, experience, create meaning in order to attain understanding and knowledge. With #AI, you as prompter are the body part. Without you, there's no knowing, esp. no all-knowing AI. And no apocalypse either. -
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anderbill (band@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 28-Sep-2026 11:35:18 JST 
anderbill
@iDGS @elliotjaystocks from bsky: new research reports that cats vocalize more when greeting male owners. researchers suggest that this is because cats have apparently learned that men require additional explanation when provided with basic communication.
I don't like the idea that cats are judging me this accurately.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 28-Sep-2026 13:13:12 JST
simsa03
What remains of the revolution, of the noble radiance—one or two new words, a language, slightly altered. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Sep-2026 06:28:08 JST
simsa03
One wonders why there has not been (much) resistance against Hitler and his regime, against Stalin and his regime, or against Putin and his regime. (Or against Xi and his regime, for that matter.) And why there is resistance against Trump and his regime. (And why there has been, at least in the beginning before people were slaughtered in multitudes, resistance against Erdoğan in Turkey, against the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, against the Islamists in various other parts of the world.)
The reason why Putin's regime is stable and Trump's regime is not, is that Putin meticulously observes political procedure and protocol: He holds elections even though it's clear he'll win; he follows the law by the book even if he has to rewrite the book to obtain the laws convenient to him.
The same happened under Stalin and under Hitler (at least before the war). The strict observance of the rules, laws, protocols lends normality to the monstrosity. The monstrosity is possible because it is introduced and increased under the rules and procedures of normality. Thus everyone can have a sense of normality while society and the state turn into barbarity and bestiality. Normality is the key. Not some mysterious "banality of evil" or some miraculous brainwashing or some (libidinous) desire for submission (Wilhelm Reich and others).
The strict obedience of rules, laws, protocols even and especially (!) by the instigators of the regime themselves creates the frame of normality in which every slip into monstrosity can appear at the same time awful and reasonable. To turn into a monster you need a sense of normality.
And that is why there is resistance against Trump and his regime. Because he doesn't follow the book. He appears capricious and self-serving. He doesn't create a sense of normality, he doesn't create a new frame of normality under and in which people could slide into monstrosity. He has no discipline; he doesn't provide a sense that he himself obeys the laws, rules, protocols that are there to be observed by all for there to be a society. He is incapable of holding up and instilling a (new) sense of normality. That's why people rebel and fight back. Why there is a possibility to fight back. Because this capriciousness, his capriciousness, is the opposite of what people know and embrace as normality. It is his capriciousness that prevents people from sliding into monstrosity.
(And that is why resistance against Erdoğan, the Ayatollahs, the Islamists is or has been abound: they all failed to create a sense of normality, and came down on every resistance that arose from a different sense of normality than what was in the leaders' mind, by brute force.)
Again: There is no "banality of evil". There is not even a "desire" for normality but the importance of normality for there to be monstrosity. Without normality, monstrosity becomes a choice. With a sense and frame of normality, monstrosity becomes a version of "hard times but we'll get through this".
(And that is also why even in the most absurd caricature of "society", the mafia organization, rules and protocols and rituals are so important and to be observed by all: It is this sense of normality that makes syndicate members capable of monstrosities they no longer sense as such.) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 18-Sep-2026 01:16:56 JST
simsa03
A more inconspicuous rat race involved in #AI: The right will embrace it because they'll claim that immigrants are no longer needed for the economy. The left will embrace it as with declining populations the services of the welfare state keep being financed. Who's going to be first? -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 18-Sep-2026 01:16:15 JST
simsa03
First they feared nuclear armament will destroy civilisation. Then they feared climate change will destroy civilisation. Now they fear #AI will destroy civilisation. You always fear as most alarming threat that which can be painted best as dire challenge to your accustomed life.
The fact that people stopped worrying about nuclear armament and climate change—although leaving them with feelings of unease—shows how this is not about threat assessment but about people's need for hysteria. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 17-Sep-2026 09:51:19 JST
simsa03
Today I had another awful day-long encounter with German railway company Deutsche Bahn. This is beyond ridiculous, beyond disastrous. This has become Third World infrastructure. Not because of years of neglect but because of years of piecemeal attempts to improve a rotten #infrastructure.
A patchwork of projects, measures, strategic decisions apparently switched right during implementation. What DB turned into this awful carrier is not the inability of its employees and its managers. They would, if they could.
It's more sinister. In administration, years of new rules and new guidances stacked on top inflate a bureaucracy to the point of utter immobility. What I didn't understand till today is that as you can "improve" and "repair" a bureaucracy to the point of collapse, the same holds true for infrastructure.
They "improved to the worse" the problems and necessities of a once functioning railway system to the point of its immobility, standstill, and in particular: irreparability.
In fact, we really should ask Russia to invade and destroy Germany so that—like after WWII—we can rebuild a new infrastructure that may have the chance to last another 60 years. This is no cynicism. When in multiple attempts to refurbish a system you end up screwing it beyond repair, the most sensible course of action is to start from scratch. Which is, obviously, not possible, and that's the point. You cannot improve the system, and any attempt to do so makes things worse.
In the meantime, DB personnel is complaining about the increase in violence and aggression from customers towards the employees (conductors, mostly). And DB reacts by hiring more security staff, more bouncers. Which is understandable but still: nuts.
The point is, nothing works, everything falls apart, and no travel plan survives the first boarding. Passengers cannot find information, cannot reach anyone capable or responsible, and in their frustration, hate, disgust, and anger lash out violently. But instead of fixing the issues—which, as we saw, is not possible—DB hires more muscle to restrain violent customers. Like ICE agents on their hunt for illegal migrants. And then we have right-wing fucks like the German AfD who blame "it" on "the migrants".
But migrants are not responsible for years of neglect. They are not responsible for the dirt, the shabby run-down stations no-one has time, money, or interest to repair and clean up. Rude customer behaviour in public, even from migrants, may add to the impression of decline, but singling out the migrants as the easiest picks is disingenuous and nasty. People pick on them because the real problems cannot be solved. By no-one.
And that's where constraints in infrastructure improvement can easily turn into lynch justice. A thriving infrastructure is not just a human right, it is a necessary precondition to uphold human rights. Eat this, Hume! Read some Kafka. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Sep-2026 10:25:46 JST
simsa03
Wedged between analytic philosophy, empiricism, naturalism on the one side, history of philosophy and hermeneutics on the other, Bealer was to me the last standard-bearer of a contemporary rationalism. He made me hold on to rationalism as still a serious albeit unfashionable option. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Sep-2026 09:34:26 JST
simsa03
Only now have I heard that George Bealer, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, has passed away in January 2025 at the age of 81. In the late 1980s he once held a lecture at my university on his book "Quality and Concept", a work I barely understood but deeply admired for its aspiration. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 23:23:49 JST
simsa03
Hiroshi Sato, "A map of my writing" https://medium.com/@hiroshi.sato.isg/a-map-of-my-writing-0f09d2f81bf8
"I write from a small island at the southern edge of Japan, on the edge of Eurasia — about design, culture, and the imperfect systems we live inside. The pieces below circle a handful of questions from different angles, so many of them belong to more than one place on this map. Wander in wherever a title catches you."
sources
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 07:46:42 JST
simsa03
One aspect of #Ai doomerism is the fear that these "systems" (in lack of a better word) may quickly become uncontrollable, in their working inscrutable, and on a trajectory to build more advanced AI on their own.
But we don't control the weather or the climate either. Instead we opt for mitigation and protection, less so for a "stop" of climate change. The same should be the attitude towards AI.
In fact, the current AI catastrophism and doomerism is reminiscent of the climate panic before we came to terms with the need to implement means of mitigation. That is, AI doomerism may very well be a sign of us not yet knowing how to mitigate the consequences of its implementation. And like the high complexity of climate change and the many factors that have to be sorted out and balanced against each other to adapt industrialized societies and economies and make them survive through climate consequences, similar things seem to hold for the introduction of AI.
Various aspects are in play: • The constant conflation and confusion of the impacts of the technology and the impacts of capitalism in general. • The refusal of industry leaders and lawmakers to treat AI as a consumer goods (with safety regulations and liability legislation) in particular. • The economic consequences on jobs and prosperity. • The fundamental psychological changes in people's understanding of what it means to be human as traits hitherto solely confined to Man will now be shared by his tools and, subsequently, other beings.
To sort these things out already means to cross over into another culture, if not civilization. That's fine, that's what's happening all the time. And there will be collateral damages, like everywhere, every time. Still. The current panic and the sense of doom are a reaction not towards the technology but our understanding what this technology does to us, and our helplessness what to do about this loss of sovereignty.
In this sense, not AI is the problem but our feeling of helplessness which we rationalize and tie it on features of and thus "project" onto the machines—like so much else we project on them. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 04:41:00 JST
simsa03
Kevin Kelly, "Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use" https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/arguments-in-favor-of-ai-fair-use
AI #FYI #copyright #sources
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 11-Sep-2026 01:50:13 JST
simsa03
Idrees Kahloon, "The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap" https://theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/ 08/mamdani-affordability-crisis-consumer-socialism/687603/
Perhaps trivial but an eye-opener to me.
" 'Consumer socialism' does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices."
"One irony of consumer socialism is that it is better tailored to the laptop classes—which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party—than to the American left’s traditional working-class base."
Perhaps one reason why today's "working-class" is staunchly conservative.
!reading -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Sep-2026 00:46:14 JST
simsa03
"... this miserable humbug of a world"
—Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Sep-2026 14:42:53 JST
simsa03
Everyone who votes "protest" or to stick "it" to "them" isn't acting like an adult and responsible citizen in consideration of his community and the society at large, but as a spoilt brat insisting to be cuddled by the government and screeching when that doesn't happen in the way it expects. The crisis of polity and political self-government is a crisis of adults acting like children. No politician or party should cater to that attitude but continue to provide their proposals for the electorate to decide upon. Just saying. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Sep-2026 11:38:00 JST
simsa03
♪ Frazey Ford, "Runnin'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wVDjtfIQy4&t=11s
!listening
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