Wednesday 3rd April 2024

[refitman]

Morning all.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Anyone about today?

[frog222]

Anyone about today?

Rather too much reading and watching so far, plus racking my brain how to fix a small practical problem ...

so will go for a health-walk on the beach , stopping off to get some self-tapping screws at the agri-coop to hopefully fix said fiddly problem !

[AnatolyKasparov]

Has finally stopped raining here now.

Should make the most of it as more of the previous same is promised for Thursday and Friday

[frog222]

Same here, after my walk on the sand will now do a little strimming of jungle !

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Reform supporters are going mental over this.



Here are the openly racist candidates these people are furious about not being able to vote for.

https://hopenothate.org.uk/2024/04/03/m ... s-exposed/

As the Tories have found out if you pander to racists they'll soon turn on you if they decide you're not being racist enough. Now it's Reform's turn.

[frog222]

Listened with half an ear to Part1 this morning, a GHASTLY story of Voice Chat, housewives backbiting on subsidiary private chats away from the'official' one ....

Part 2 -- listening now !

" In 2016, amid the post-EU referendum chaos, one man had an idea. His name was Steve Baker, and he was a low-profile Tory MP. But his WhatsApp group - the home of the hard Brexiteers - soon became the most powerful force in British politics. Sam Coates of Sky News thinks that political WhatsApp groups like Baker’s helped bring down three Conservative prime ministers in a row.

The second of these, Boris Johnson, was a “WhatsApp addict”, according to his former chief of staff Dominic Cummings. And so, during Covid when Number 10 was still using fax machines to get NHS data, everyone turned to instant messaging instead. Forget “sofa government”, this was even more informal - as well as faster, more fluid and full of swearing.

But, Helen Lewis asks Cummings, is this really the best way to govern a country? What about the possibility of leaks, hacks - and conveniently lost messages when an inquiry rolls around? "

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y28c

Eeek ! My company was dealing FX with KSA and other far-flung institutions by telex in the Seventies , but as markets sped up with computerisation voice was used more often, but was equally HAIRY ...

PS I found it difficlt to believe Number Ten relied on TELEXES for NHS msgs in 2020 !

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Ah so this is how the Israelis have managed to murder civilians with such speed and in such numbers that since WWII the only conflict to exceed their bloodthirsty efficiency is the Rwandan genocide.

What a truly sickening and terrifying read. How anyone could defend this inhuman barbarity is completely beyond me.

‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... airstrikes

The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.

In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict.

[frog222]

RE the pandering to racists nuttery we also have the pandering to tax reduction nuts, ex ... Trussonomics !

Listening to France Culture on my way back from the beach

" Public expenditure is about the same, but
Receipts are DOWN because of Tax Cuts "

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Oh god, it's pathetic.

[gilsey]

Ah so this is how the Israelis have managed to murder civilians with such speed and in such numbers that since WWII the only conflict to exceed their bloodthirsty efficiency is the Rwandan genocide.

What a truly sickening and terrifying read. How anyone could defend this inhuman barbarity is completely beyond me.

When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.

According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.

'The banality of evil'. Right in front of our eyes, every day.

Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.

At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.