JoBo

Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.

Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”

Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”

Worth reading in full but here's some snippets:

In 1985, hundreds of Columbia students, led by the four-year-old Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), initiated a blockade of Hamilton Hall in the center of campus – the same hall peacefully occupied and renamed by students on Tuesday.

The protest lasted for three weeks, drawing worldwide support. The administration photographed, videotaped and threatened student activists with disciplinary charges and expulsion. Five months later, after years of dragging its feet, the university divested from companies implicated in apartheid South Africa.

In 2013 and 2014 a successful campaign by the Columbia Prison Divest students forced the university to divest from the private prison industry. Underlining the linkages of struggles, Students Against Mass Incarceration (Sami) sought the advice of Students for Justice in Palestine.

...

Omar was a Palestinian student activist on campus at the time, supporting the Free South Africa Movement and highlighting striking similarities between the struggles in South Africa and Palestine to dismantle settler-colonialism and apartheid. Omar was deeply inspired by the divestment demand as a tactic to pressure a duplicitous and complicit institution. He later co-founded the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calling for ending international state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

Without a trial and a means to clear his name, Lehrmann turned to defamation action, claiming that Network Ten and “The Project” presenter Lisa Wilkinson damaged his reputation by providing enough information in the program for him to be identified, though he was not named.

Network Ten and Wilkinson chose to fight the charge, mounting a truth defense, meaning that to win, the network’s lawyers needed to prove that on the balance of probabilities the rape happened.

Lee found Monday that the two had sex that night, but Higgins was so inebriated she couldn’t possibly have given her consent – and that Lehrmann didn’t seek to obtain it.

“I’m satisfied that it is more likely than not that Mr Lehrmann’s state of mind was such that he was so intent upon gratification to be indifferent to Miss Higgins’ consent,” said Lee.

The ruling delivers a devastating blow to Lehrmann’s attempt to clear his name. As Lee put it in his judgement: “Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat.”

Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are imminently fixable with the right methodological tweaks.

Common practices of technology development can produce this kind of naivete. Alberto Toscano calls this a “Culture of Abstraction.” He argues that logical abstraction, core to computer science and other scientific analysis, influences how we perceive real-world phenomena. This abstraction away from the particular and toward idealized representations produces and sustains apolitical conceits in science and technology. We are led to believe that if we can just “de-bias” the data and build in logical controls for “non-discrimination,” the techno-utopia will arrive, and the returns will come pouring in. The argument here is that these adverse consequences are unintended. The assumption is that the intention of algorithmic inference systems is always good — beneficial, benevolent, innovative, progressive.

Stafford Beer gave us an effective analytical tool to evaluate a system without getting sidetracked arguments about intent rather than its real impact. This tool is called POSIWID and it stands for “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” This analytical frame provides “a better starting point for understanding a system than a focus on designers’ or users’ intention or expectations.”

But the ban – last updated in 2003 – only applies to traditional television channels and not to streaming television delivered over the internet. With audiences increasingly switching off traditional broadcast channels, the UK’s big political parties are preparing to take advantage of the loophole and pay millions of pounds to insert themselves into living rooms.

Tom Edmonds, who ran digital advertising campaigns for the Conservatives in the 2010s, said politicians were desperate to pay to access screens. He said if British broadcasters did not run such ads, US tech companies would happily take the money. “You are going to see political ads on your TV. A lot of it will go on YouTube because you can get it in HD on your TV,” he added.

In the past, British political parties did not have enough money to buy campaign adverts. But Labour and the Conservatives are set to take advantage of a little-noticed rule change announced last year by Michael Gove, which will increase the amount national political parties can spend on a general election campaign from £19.5m in 2019 to £35m for the next general election.

Maybe, to the extend that we are institutionalists, we need to recognize that our vote doesn't free us from any other obligations between elections. Maybe we need to recognize the ways our commitment to institutions that abuse others have caused abused people to despair and mistrust us. Maybe we need to admit how we were wrong about the nature of our institutions, how we believed they protected and benefitted everyone simply because they protected and benefitted us. Some of us, if we are particularly unthreatened by fascism and particularly benefitted by supremacy, might need to realize that listening and following are more effective anti-fascist actions for us now than speaking and leading.

Or maybe, to the extent that we are anti-institutionalist, we need to recognize that our anti-institutional alignment doesn't mean we aren't still culpable to the degree we are, and recognize that if we are taking that alignment primarily to evade culpability, we're still aligning ourselves spiritually with that institutional supremacy. Maybe we need to recognize that while elections aren't the only thing, they are still a thing. Maybe we need to recognize that just as voting doesn't free us from whatever culpability we carry, not voting doesn't free us, either.

If I have the right zoom level to make the text in the feed a sensible size, the font size in the threads is too small to read easily. Correct the zoom level in the thread and the font size in the feed becomes way too large.

This has long been a problem and I'm not sure why this is suddenly irritating me more than usual. Is it just me? Is there a setting I'm missing?

E2A: It's likely a browser issue. I've found a workaround, thanks all.

Archive link

Summary linked, long version here: https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/origins_of_a_disaster_-_summary_-_eleanor_shaikh.pdf

Both hosted by jfsa.org.uk, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance website.

Driven by wider political agendas which included the protection of Japanese inward investment in UK plc, Blair ruled that the Post Office must purchase a salvaged version of Horizon. Insufficient work had been done to determine the viability of this option and the Post Office itself was adamantly opposed to the idea. Right up until the day before the Prime Minister’s decision, the Post Office were vociferous; they wished to terminate Horizon and start afresh with a new supplier. In any event, they argued they would need months to assess his chosen solution:

‘POCL believe that the hardware and software is probably sub-optimal as the platform for providing network banking and Modern Government services, but would need several months' work to have a clear view.'

And all the others, thanks.

"Vennells’s incentive payments add up to £2.2m over the course of her time in charge. She may note that when James Crosby, former boss of HBOS, gave up his knighthood in 2013 after a parliamentary committee found he “sowed the seeds” of destruction at the bank, he volunteered to surrender 30% of his pension entitlement. Those were the days before clawback clauses but Crosby was nodding to the principle that giving up a gong is not enough. In a post-clawback world, matters should be simpler: the rules are meant to insist on repayment of bonuses. If the relevant clauses aren’t triggered in Vennells’s case, when would they be?

"None of which is to deny that the rotten saga goes further than her. The politicians with oversight roles of the state-owned Post Office clearly have questions to answer, as do the relevant executives at Fujitsu, supplier of the dodgy IT software. But, among the business crew at the top of the Post Office over the years, the two chairs during Vennells’s time must explain why they backed the executives to the hilt."