deathmtn

contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else.
I've seen this person many times-they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nations dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild —and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I've seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I'm an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.
My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity-it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self. interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

While normal navigation apps try to find the fastest route, Palestinian digital networks focus on avoiding risks.

“This is a collective effort to save lives,” Mohamed Atiyat, a minibus driver who participates in and manages WhatsApp groups where thousands share real-time road updates, told Rest of World. “We share minute-by-minute updates on road conditions through videos, voice notes, and text messages so we can help each other stay safe.”

Atiyat’s experience shows what’s at stake — he once spent 36 hours trying to find a route to the hospital for a young cancer patient after the town of Al-Auja was sealed off.

OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative, open-source mapping platform, allows communities to document and update local geographical situations. It allows Palestinians to accurately represent their villages, roads, and barriers that might otherwise be misrepresented or entirely absent on regular navigation tools such as Google Maps and Waze.

The price of reporting under these conditions is everything, As of July 2024, at least
108 Palestinian journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. There is nowhere else on earth with an even remotely comparable death toll. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day. That most every major Western journalism prize that emerges from the coverage of this onslaught will overlook or at best offer glancing recognition of the work of men and women like Dahdouh for fear of being labeled biased is as clear an indictment of the industry's cracked moral compass as exists anywhere.

The most frustrating aspect of all this is that most journalists know how to be tenacious. They know how to chase down a story, how to speak truth to power. In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don't collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren't ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator.

At Imbue we are trying to use computers and data and software and AI to help imagine and make better idea tools for participatory intelligence. Applications, ecosystems, protocols, languages, algorithms, policies, stories: these are all idea tools and we probably need all of them. This is a shared mission for humanity, not a VC plan for value-extraction. That's the point of participatory.

The Amazon Alexa Fund is a venture capital fund established by Amazon to support companies that are enhancing voice technology and AI. It aims to foster innovation in the voice technology ecosystem.

Here. when we name the dead, when we name these dead in particular, it is customary to note the number of children obliterated, because the men are assumed to be terrorists and the women might be terrorists or at the very least go on to create them.

When next this happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

“There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.”