Maoo

The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.

The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel's conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.

The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it's challenging to tell the difference between "the diaspora started here" vs. "the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued". From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it's also difficult to disentangle from scientists' biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it's worth.

Yes I know I pointed this out in a different comment first. Just wanted to clarify MEMRI's status as absolute trash that will always paint Israel's perceived enemies in the worst possible light, both through uncharitable translations and misleading editorialization on meanings.

Yeah I already wrote a comment about this before this one. Just pointing out that MEMRI is completely unreliable. And the headline itself, promoted by them, is bullshit. The contents is where you find some actually problematic statements, though they are in no way new for Assad.

MEMRI is an op, literally founded by Israeli intelligence

The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn't doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:

• Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.

• Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it's a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in "the homeland".

Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.

It was cool how they got Drake to come back and hang out with all those high schoolers

Quit you cowards

Most of them. They try to "jumpstart" their prodigy by gathering "training" data by employing remote workers that they will massively underpay. They claim that they'll transition to pure AI over time. They... just kinda don't, lol.

Stripping felons of the right to vote was/is a part of Jim Crow, wherein blackness was systematically criminalized, usually through forced poverty and then a criminalization of poverty (e.g. petty theft for survival). Similar to a poll tax, the goal was to prevent black people from having a political voice, including but not limited to electoral. This is why these laws are mostly in former slave states. They were a reaction to liberation. These anti-black policies also applied to anyone else that would be systematically marginalized, serving as a reusable tool for the ruling class. Make poverty itself a deep pit of disenfranchisement and all you need to do is make your targeted group poor enough. Keeping the poor and precarious from organizing politically is also a goal unto itself for the ruling class, though we shouldn't get overly invested in the idea that voting would ever be enough to actually properly contradict the ruling class itself.

The criminal "justice" system is not about reform, certainly not in the US. Every aspect of it makes it harder to reintegrate into society afterwards, usually with your record following you well into your life after leaving the prison. Getting a job, finding housing, applying for benefits, all of these will be seriously hampered by being convicted of a crime and serving time. Instead, the criminal system is designed, again, to marginalize. Take the people that are a threat to the perceived interests of business owners and isolate and harm them, also attempting to create the appearance of a deterrent so that others don't want to threaten private property interests. This impetus poisons the entire system even when it deals with crimes that are not directly crimes of poverty or capitalist alienation (though the societies and pain constructed by the ruling class are certainly their fault).

Please note, however, that the fact that so many people are disenfranchised already shows us that the ruling class isn't going to let folks vote them out or otherwise engage in the political policies necessary to address injustice. They won't let us solve the climate crisis or systemic unemployment or treating housing as an investment. The overt disenfranchisement is a blatant example of how they tip the scales in their favor, but it is far from the only one; most forms of disenfranchisement are so deeply ingrained that few people notice them as such. Poor or biased schooling so that the public will accept propaganda narratives. The maintenance of an economic underclass stripped of rights (such as undocumented immigrants). A requirement to work so many hours that you cannot rapidly gain political consciousness. A media apparatus wholly owned by the oppressor class and obediently taking orders from it on what to focus on, which reporters to hire and fire. The elimination of public squares and meeting places by which to organize. The cooption of academia through a variety of means, ensuring that their work suits the goals of the ruling class or is at least stripped of its capacity to organize against them. The limiting of the concept of political action to voting and going to cop-sanctioned protests. Etc etc.

The way out of this is to organize directly with one another, to use our organizations to (further) identify the material root causes of injustice, and to work with more than just the tools offered to us by those who already have power.

I'll never stop

The main question I would have is why use it instead of protobuf? Having native support for binary values aside.

Cool research, terrible press release