Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp), page 3
-
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 13-Jul-2026 19:32:07 JST 
simsa03
There was a generation of male actors that I liked and who touched me in an almost physical way: Sam Shepard, William Hurt, Sam Neill — stars in the 1990s, epitome of the ascetic masculine intellectual. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 13-Jul-2026 17:20:18 JST
simsa03
Sam Neill has passed away. I liked his restrained acting in "Until the End of the World" (1991) by Wim Wenders, giving his character a kind of wondrously gazing air. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 13-Jul-2026 11:40:40 JST
simsa03
In international security reasoning it is often claimed that Putin might "test" NATO's unity and willingness to apply Art. 5 mutual assistance by staging a small incursion, e.g., into the Baltic States. If NATO doesn't react according to Art. 5, then it's finished. And if it reacts, then Putin can withdraw quickly without costs. That line of reasoning is rubbish. Putin wouldn't learn anything about NATO member states' mutual defense readiness that way because Art. 5 is 1) vaguely worded, and 2) allows every member state to decide individually what to contribute in a case of an invocation of the alliance clause. That way, Putin wouldn't gain any information about NATO readiness from such small incursions. The matter is slightly different, though, when seen in the context of bureaucratic procedure. In case of an attack or an incursion, an affected NATO member state first (!) needs to inform and address the NATO Council which then (!) holds a meeting and after that (!) decides whether the incident is a case of NATO Art. 5. And that not so much means that Putin may get information about the duration it takes for such a procedure to conclude. It primarily means that Putin may try to find the exact threshold at which an affected NATO member state is indeed (!) willing to appeal to the Council and when it is not but rather lets the incursion slide. Putin may thus gain valuable information about the readiness and willingness of individual (!) NATO member states to react. And that is all the more informative given the risks involved for an affected member state, e.g., should it decide to appeal to the NATO Council and the latter decides not to proclaim an incident of mutual Art. 5 assistance. To sum up: The point of such incursions into territories of NATO member states is not to assess the readiness of NATO to act in general according to Art. 5 but whether and when individual member states of NATO are willing to appeal to the NATO Council to decide whether the alliance clause applies. That provides detailed information that may be of far more use to Putin. -
Embed this notice
anderbill (band@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jul-2026 07:06:29 JST 
anderbill
some humor from Threads:
-
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 09-Jul-2026 02:16:09 JST
simsa03
For what it's worth: Most of the severe physical & emotional violence, sexual assault, economic hardship, threatening altercation, abuse, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, scapegoating... I received from women, not men. It's for that reason I don't believe in privileged female victimization.
As a boy my mother beat me with cooking spoons and clogs, forced me to get out of the trash the food I had thrown into, and made me eat it. It was the mothers in my life who for various reasons came up with the very idea of making me responsible for the calamities in their lives.
So people may perhaps excuse me when I don't buy into the attitude of much female writings of today that somehow their experiences of violence is the most exceptional and that because of that they have or earn a privileged status of innocence, authenticity, even truth.
We all know the stories of appalling violence in church-run orphanages by nuns against children. Violence is not a male quality, women are not the "peaceful sex". Violence is a human trait. And as much as humans are capable of grace and forgiveness, so they are of bestiality and sadistic lust.
Female writers should be aware of that, should be in contact with their lust of murder, their sadistic fantasies which they would love to live out if only they could. But right now, what I see in female writings on violence they endure from men, I mostly sense a form of sanctimonious morality.
I'm not sure where this denial of reality comes from. This sanctimoniousness that always already knows who's the perpetrator and who's the victim. A morality that dresses up as piousness and integrity, but mostly serves to project and deflect. In order not to confront one's own bestiality.
Some very disturbing Protestantism, even Puritanism, lingers at the root of much female discourse on violence. Like at the root of capitalism (see Max Weber on that). The concept of twofold-predestination.
That Gd already decided who's going up and who's going down, and that once outer status in this reality (in capitalism: one's economic and material well-being) is a sign of Gd's decision on which which track He presumably has put us on.
There is no Redemption, that is, but self-earned and self-administered self-improvement. There is no Jonah and the Whale, there is the attempt of self-redemption, thereby almost deliberately overlooking that In Christianity the believer is redeemed from guilt, not from pain.
And so people in the world of self-improvement, in the secular spheres of former-Protestantism, get it wrong twice: They strive for self-redemption (although only G*d can redeem), and they aim to self-redeem from pain (instead of guilt).
To me, this is a common feature in much of the humanistic movements since the early 1960s. The shift from sincerity to authenticity (see Lionel Trilling on that), that somehow the open display of one's "inner core" reveals a truth that is endangered by the contact with outer reality.
Which is why the encroaching outer reality needs to be fought, and forced off. It is telling that today's Women's Lib is not about political or economic rights, but authenticity, the right to self-expression, the right to overstep boundaries, to violate others in pursuit of self-realization.
I find it most telling that in the usual talk of "strong women" what is meant is not "strong" but "authoritarian". Because strength is capable of acknowledging differences, perhaps even cherish them, whereas authoritarianism fights them and insists on homogeneous behavior and morality.
Or at least so it has been in my coming to age: When my (second) mother called herself a "strong woman" (she has been a feminist of the second generation), and most she displayed was authoritarian lust to bend people to her will and values.
Anyway, much would be achieved if today's women would accept their own lust for violence, their urge to torture, their own bestiality that comes in so many guises and forms. At least it would change the trite discourse of today.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
-
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 06-Jul-2026 04:31:07 JST
simsa03
Mathilda Heller, "The Lancet publishes call to suspend Israeli Medical Association from global medical body" https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-899346
And, of course, no similar call to suspend or boycott Iran, Russia, or North Korea in The Lancet. Fucking anti-Semites! (The World Medical Association disapproves the petition.) -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jul-2026 02:55:35 JST
simsa03
The "India-Middle-East-Europe Economic Corridor", first proposed by India at the G20 in 2023, would integrate India, Middle East, Levant, Israel, Europe, sidelining the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb. Announced merely a few months before 10/7, to me it puts the attacks in a new light.
A few sources on IMEC:
https://mei.edu/backgrounder/the-india-middle-east-europe-economic-corridor/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_8IHJ7SP2U https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/9910b34283bfa4b3852c105c9a8b343513b2da8ea86a2b3e43f04ad837bec8d9/view -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 01-Jul-2026 01:26:46 JST
simsa03
"El Mambo de Stendhal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXhnkX8GTrY
Wonderful!
To all the pious doom scrollers in need of a new apocalypse now that climate change is no longer sexy. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 29-Jun-2026 03:24:41 JST
simsa03
The "doom trolling" (Cal Newport) of big #AI companies with their inexplicable Janus-faced strategy of apocalyptic fearmongering and insistence on increasing the speed of development, makes good sense when seen as their attempt to have the public treat AI not as an ordinary consumer product.
If AI were treated like an ordinary consumer product, cost-benefits would have to be weighed, safety measures established, terms of liability determined. That's not what big companies want in general, esp. not re: groundbreaking tech whose long-term impact can't properly be assessed yet.
To lend the technology an air of inevitability and of inaccessibility to control makes the public and regulators doubt, thus, waste time, in which the AI companies can build infrastructures, establish pervasiveness in consumers' life, and eschew liabilities in absence of legal standards.
Cal Newport almost gets it right (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1VkPn1fhKE&t=239s and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html) but then wanders off and dilutes this point by mixing it up with irrelevant references to Silicon Valley tech religion and #AI companies competitions in staff recruitment.
People love to talk about the "Tech Barons", "neo-feudalist" actors driven by libertarian ideology (cf. the "libertarian manifesto" by Luke Kemp), aiming to create autonomous city states without government regulations interfering in economic "liberty" (Peter Thiel).
Yes, these things exist. As does the transhumanist movement of human-machine merger and augmentation (Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk). At least as ideas. But these are irrelevant as well.
One might argue that having AI being exempted from the status of an ordinary consumer product plays into the hand of these libertarian and transhumanist aspirations. But for that AI is too groundbreaking and, because of that, still too vague to serve as a tool to bring about these fantasies.
And I think these people know that. So they stick to what they know best: Interrupt markets, scale quickly, define and dominate customer dependencies, try to evade liability or shift the burden on the public. Along their customary approach to lay claim on new territory while insisting to act without regulation, to suffocate any discussion on AI being a consumer product in need of regulation, and instead hyping up what a cultural and technological breakthrough that is, is sensible company strategy.
I'm aware that seen as an argument this is question begging: What has been the indicator of a thesis later turns out to become its evidence. So, strictly speaking, I haven't argued in favour of AI companies pursuing this strategy. But still, as an insight, it makes a lot of sense to me.
Thanks to Cal Newport for triggering these thoughts. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 28-Jun-2026 02:49:21 JST
simsa03
. https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/d31621f05803f8352447afe3df753bf4e8ab14ed4f38a7fc433538cbb18686f3/view -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 26-Jun-2026 13:40:10 JST
simsa03
How do you silence minority voices on #Wikipedia? Not through malfunctioning #AI but through spiteful crowds of editors with a political agenda. https://gnusocial.jp/conversation/6505358#notice-12802304 -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 26-Jun-2026 13:31:53 JST
simsa03
Shlomit Aharoni Lir et al., "Between conflict and contribution: Jewish editors and the politics of knowledge on Wikipedia" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565261459183#con https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/be676d5cfc78baac0bdb4d2e6a09cbfbd7eb9502b320d200187e2e6a53828894/view -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 26-Jun-2026 08:23:13 JST
simsa03
And soaked in holy water. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 26-Jun-2026 02:21:53 JST
simsa03
The only doom and gloom I accept about #AI is its being a very plausible candidate to solve the Fermi Paradox. Most other eschatologist AI myths are today's variants of end time fantasies. It's fitting that the AI eschatology gains traction as the climate change eschatology loses it.
As long as anti-technology sentiments were still a cultural option, the fear of climate change peeked. Now with industries, military, and governments aggressively reinvigorating the cult of technology again, AI becomes the final frontier of horror. Not to forget that the last end time fantasy prior to climate change was mutual nuclear destruction in the Cold War, esp. in the early 1980s till the end of the USSR.
All three end time fantasies are based on the most horrific extrapolation of a pervasive cultural and technological trend of its time. This fantasy is not localized but always of planetary scale. All three are man-made inventions, having become uncontrollable and run wild.
Another characteristic of these end times is the occurrence of proselytizing movements calling people to repent before the Day of Judgement. And, obviously, it is THIS time that things are REALLY at stake. And if we not repent, then we face a global meltdown.
I don't deny dangers. Of course the world was several times close to nuclear exchange (the last time in 1983) and we managed to come through. Of course there is climate change (and the worst case scenarios RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 have been scrapped). Of curse there is danger and risk with #AI. And I don't say that we will enclose AI like we did with mutual nuclear destruction or, in part, with climate change.
But what I do say is that undetected semi-religious urges keep nudging us to fall back into a script of the end of the world that has originally been written about 2,000 years ago. And that is not in itself good advice for risk assessment and risk management.
There may be good reasons why the seeming need for God-like punishment for unrepentant people return in secular times in various secular guises. Or to put it in the language of another context: There may be good reasons why in times of an alleged "Anthropocene" the wild and the wilderness return inside the human created environment called "the world" in form of unpredictability, chaos, neuroses and mental ailments.
But I find it important to highlight that our reactions to factual risks as to neurotic fantasizing always seem to be to return to the same old patterns and recipes already suggested in the Christian bible. Not that this were in itself automatically the wrong approach. But it is an approach by which we primarily enact a drama that probably caters to psychological needs and only secondarily something that may guide us to tackle the issues at hand.
A good example of this unquestioned attitude is the constant and trite humanisation of AI. When main researchers willy-nilly talk as if AI were (or could be) "conscious", have "intentions", "wants" and "needs", and, of course, "urges to destroy us", that already shows how people don't reflect on how their use of language posits qualities to world phenomena for which they have no evidence other than their unexamined projection.
There are indeed good arguments that humans perhaps cannot but project such qualities onto any and every agent that displays sufficiently complex response behaviour. (see e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/simsa0.bsky.social/post/3mhtefafdzk24 et passim). And perhaps machines may one day indeed be conscious (with or without a sense of self) independent of whether the underlying molecular structure is biological or cast iron. But in all cases this is playing with our fantasies and treating stuff so that it exhibits these fantasies.
"Everyone is an artist", Joseph Beuys once famously quipped (1969). And that lovely sentiment is quite different from Andy Warhol's reactionary claim that "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" (1967). Because what Beuys acknowledged as an essential part of the human condition, Warhol could only fathom and appreciate as a form of making one's usability and exploitability the most precious resource in a capitalist market economy.
What AI developers don't get is that they live the "Warhol Nightmare", not the "Beuys Dream".
They therefore misunderstand what they are dealing with and placate as nightmare what would far better and far more humanely be identified as another example of Man's age-old fascination with automatons.
Man always tried to understand himself with the help of metaphors derived from the most perfect machines he invented at a time. And always did he look half-scared onto the Golem he had apparently created, only to learn that, again, even this time he missed to create one.
Some, not all, discovery and recognition takes place when we lift the veil of metaphor. Esp. when it comes to technology and the changes we impose on environments, on infrastructure, on economic systems, it is recommended to know when and when we're not dealing under the spell of them. Because if we don't, we fall back to mutual fearmongering and scapegoating (and into the Warhol Nightmare). Which is never a good option when dealing with living beings and the planet as a whole. It's less fun, too. . https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/468c884019248ef2d872716ef6b7bcdc1b80fd16f0e46740670b8c1c0fa686c5/view -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jun-2026 11:52:41 JST
simsa03
♪ The Chieftains featuring Mick Jagger, "The Long Black Veil" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNWycgioJw
!listening -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 22-Jun-2026 10:27:59 JST
simsa03
Ursula Renz, "Kein Mensch kann Unrecht verzeihen. Aber man kann sich mit denen versöhnen, die es getan haben" https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/kein-mensch-kann-unrecht-verzeihen-aber-man-kann-sich-mit-denen-versoehnen-die-es-getan-haben-ld.10011905
On Hannah Arendt's distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 21-Jun-2026 11:57:23 JST
simsa03
Is it frivolous to say that I enjoy reading Dostoevsky? His sceneries and psychological twists and turns surprise me again and again, to the point that I find it funny to follow him into the rabbit holes he lays out. Calling Dostoevsky a funny author was not what I expected to say about him. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 21-Jun-2026 11:36:20 JST
simsa03
Only today did I notice the influence of Dostoevsky on the early work of the Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Interesting. -
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jun-2026 00:44:11 JST
simsa03
"Antisemitism and sexism are two expressions of the same longing for certainty in a contradictory world."
Karin Stögner, "Antisemitism and Sexism: Ideological Constellations Before and After 7 October" https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003662938/antisemitism-sexism-karin-stögner (open access, available as pdf or epub)
sources
-
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Jun-2026 10:31:58 JST
simsa03
What you call empathy is just this: people pleasing.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the