iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/08/2026

Veratify emphasizes transparent, verifiable sources—which sounds great. But its "source standards" raise questions. Questions such as "what Media Bias/Fact Check credibility data, specifically?" and "using .gov as a source of truth? in 2026?? seriously?!" 5/

Screenshot reading:
Source standards
Veratify uses Media Bias/Fact Check credibility data to help screen for the most credible news outlets.
It also prioritizes .gov and .mil sites, official releases, public records, and other authoritative primary sources.

Primary sources first
Official statements, public records, agency releases, court materials, and other direct evidence carry the most weight.
High-credibility news outlets
Media Bias/Fact Check credibility data helps narrow the news sources Veratify relies on for reporting support.
.gov and .mil sources
Government and military domains are treated as key authoritative sources when they bear directly on the factual claim.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/08/2026

First of all, this is obvious bot behavior, but the bsky account is not labeled as a bot, and the site doesn't really say anything about its process behind the scene. It does, however, say—falsely—that it declines to fact-check jokes and hyperbole 🙃 Primary source: www.veratify.ai 2/

Screenshot from veratify.ai website:
Statements that are not assertions of fact
Speech that is not intended as literal fact is outside Veratify’s scope.

Satire and parody
Content not meant to be taken literally is not adjudicated.
Jokes and hyperbole
Figurative and exaggerated speech is not adjudicated.
Fiction
Invented content and the statements within it are not adjudicated.
Quoted fictional content
A character’s words are not an assertion of fact.
Hypotheticals
Conditional framings offered for argument are not adjudicated.
Poetry and lyrics
Artistic expression is not adjudicated.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/08/2026

So this weird bot just showed up, "fact-checking" an obvious joke. I got curious and checked out its website (veratify.ai) and what I found was...odd. 1/🧵

@ianboudreau.com post:
A lot of people don't know this, but when you brush a cat, you are legally required to show them the wad of cat hair that came off of them and tell them "this is enough for another whole cat"

@veratify.bsky.social reply:
V found this claim is false. This is a well-known internet joke; there are no laws in any jurisdiction requiring pet owners to show cats their shed hair or say this phrase.

Real-time fact-checks on your feed: https://veratify.ai
Errors or comments: info@veratify.ai

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 29/07/2026

sittin' in an airport across from a guy reading a @ifbookspod.bsky.social classic

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 12/07/2026

Well, some of us would like to be represented by people who treat Graham and his ilk as enemies to be defeated, not colleagues.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 11/07/2026

Israeli grief was predestined to be drowned in blood – by Israeli violence.

Our failure to mourn In the time since October 7, Jewish Israelis and foreign sympathisers have never ceased to publicly castigate the world for failing to mourn our losses. Some highlight the first two days of fighting, when Israeli troops had not yet entered the Gaza Strip and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had not yet declared the "complete siege" for which he now stands accused of genocide. Viewing the global response to Israeli suffering during those two days as insufficient, Zionist bodies such as the World Jewish Congress quickly
found confirmation of the world's ancient,
ineradicable hatred of Jewish people.

as the failure to mourn comes from our own
society first, from its reflex to seek revenge. From the very first news of Hamas's incursion, there was no doubt that Israel's response would be violent beyond all proportion. This is not only demonstrated by the government's established track record, but also declared in established military. doctrine, and continuously reinforced by political rhetoric. If people of conscience were hesitant to engage with Israeli pain, it is not because they deny us our common humanity, but because they sensed that our pain was predestined to slip into visiting death upon others. Our grief was condemned from the very beginning,
doomed to drown in blood.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 04/07/2026

Yes! Or as I recently put it… midwestsocialist.com/2026/06/28/a... (no paywall)

That claim is, well, bullshit. But it's not merely bullshit marketing.
Bullshit is also inherent to the technology itself: LLMs cannot help but make shit up. Their output is inevitably bullshit, and, crucially, it always will be.
By now, everyone has heard about 'Al hallucinations', but this term is in itself another bullshit obfuscation. An LLM cannot "hallucinate', because it does not think, it does not sense, and it does not imagine.
It is designed to give people the impression that it is thinking, but that impression is pixel-deep. It truly is just glorified AutoCorrect: based on statistical analysis of massive amounts of (ill-gotten) text, it generates phrases, sentences, and paragraphs statistically likely to pass for what you asked for.
At no point in this process does the model reflect on, consider, or imagine anything. Above all, it does not hear, see, or otherwise sense a world outside of the texts it is based on. It doesn't get the world wrong - it has no world to get right. As one literacy specialist put it, LLMs have a "baked-in indifference to the truth." They have no grasp on reality. The closest they get is testing outputs against documents they have already ingested. They are like a ghost trapped in a massive library with no real memory of the world - only what it has read about it. It makes things up without noticing.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 01/07/2026

This is not only very dumb, but pretty racist itself. Just accepting the categories of racialization practiced by US white supremacy as essentially real and assuming groups that would be the same ‘race’ in the US can’t be racist against each other. Unserious and harmful shit.

“VIVEK CHIBBER It seems to me a pretty clear-cut principle, which is you should allow only as many immigrants in as your infrastructure and your political culture can absorb. Now, that's not giving any numbers. That's not giving any clear laws, but it's a principle. So in certain countries, that'll mean a fairly restrictive immigration policy.
Look at South Africa right now: South Africa has an immigration debate, because Zimbabwean migrants are coming into the country. And for the American left, this is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, you can't say it's racism. The American left loves to go to race as the explanation for all this stuff. And there is not a racism problem in South and Southern Africa. It is national. It is cultural. And that's why I said people are now attached to their national identities in a way that wasn't true 120 or 150 years ago.”

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 18/06/2026

A window into the mind of the Israeli right. This is a key idea: that everything would have worked out if only Israelis were allowed to do more violence, but they were foiled by legalities, hostile world leaders, or a soft-hearted fifth column. It’s a self-reinforcing motor of radicalization.

These are Kurdish militias you're talking about?
Not only. Israel can provide them with weapons. This was part of the plan. And then, to our amazement, Trump said the Kurds didn't want to fight. But, really, Trump is the one who forbade them from fighting, because Erdoğan put pressure on him not to do it. (Highlighted:) Israel had a brilliant plan and spent a lot of money, and shocked the Iranians in the beginning of the war. But you prevented the militias from acting, and now you ask why the regime didn't fall. Because you didn't give us the chance. In Gaza. In Lebanon. In Syria, In Iran. (End of highlight) Everything we wanted to do, you prevented us from doing it.
If you go to war, and you define the goal of the war, do it. If not, don't do it. It's not only that you don't do it, but you falsely blame the Kurds and the Israelis. And you give in to all the demands of Iran. And they won't stop. Tomorrow, they might say, If you don't close the Embassy in Jerusalem, we will close the strait. Then what do you do?

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 15/06/2026

how the fuck was this the middle of the episode whose ending made me cry like this?!

A shot from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 1, episode 7, "The Elysian Kingdom". Doctor M'Benga (dressed as a king) uses a tricorder to scan a tiny dog in the arms of La'an, dressed as a princess, while Nurse Chapel, dressed as a witch, watches on in fascination.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 05/06/2026

I bumped into this historical poster from the Spanish Civil War at a flea market in Madrid once, and I liked it so much I got it both as a poster and as a postcard. I love that they were in a bitter and ultimately doomed fight for their lives and they still prioritized mass political education. 💔

Spanish Civil War poster; a hand reaches in from above, offering a book titled "historia" to two welcoming hands from below. The text in rough translation: "Read! Combating ignorance you will defeat fascism. The Ministry of Public Education is opening the libraries to the people. If you cannot read in the library, borrow books there to read at home."

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 10/05/2026

Tonight in Chicago! Reflections on Marxist Political Economy Today. How can returning to Marx’s Capital help us reexamine our present conditions with fresh eyes? Let's discuss! With @gabrielwinant.bsky.social and @ramsincanon.bsky.social (and a little bit of me). @chicagodsa.bsky.social

Flyer with an image of Karl Marx:
REFLECTIONS ON MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY TODAY –
SUNDAY MAY 10, 7PM - 8:30PM
KALAPRIYA INDIAN PERFORMING ARTS CENTER – 2101 S . WABASH SUITE 1, CHICAGO, IL 60616

Join Chicago DSA for a discussion on the enduring relevance of Marxist political economy today with historian and AAUP chapter president Gabriel Winant and writer and DSA organizer Ramsin Canon.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 02/05/2026

Chicago, let's talk Marx! Panel discussion with @gabrielwinant.bsky.social and @ramsincanon.bsky.social on Sunday, May 10 in the South Loop – and a reading group starting Monday, May 18, in Bridgeport. Coordinated by yours truly for @chicagodsa.bsky.social's Political Education Committee.

(Different) flyer with an image of Karl Marx:
CAPITAL BY KARL MARX READING GROUP SERIES – Monday, May 18th, 6-8pm
Unity Center, 3339 S. Halsted, Chicago, IL

Join Chicago DSA's reading group series for the latest English translation of Capital by Karl Marx.
Monday, May 18th, 6-8pm is our first meeting of the series. Please RSVP for more information and the full reading schedule – via link in the next post.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 10/04/2026

This is the only Worf I’d work with. Anyway, thank you for the surprisingly rare name joke!

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 10/04/2026

Gotta love AI transcription 🤭

Podcast transcript about a website with a whole page of “Hezbollah” featuring Dershowitz and Bari Weiss (actually Hasbara of course)

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 23/03/2026

Logischerweise müssen alle, die geschichtsbewusst jede Relativierung ablehnen, bedingungslos diesen Staat verteidigen 🫡

Echtes Bild aus dem Twitterkonto des israelischen Außenministeriums, der Iran als Kopf einer Krake darstellt, deren Tentakel u.a. Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ und Houthis sind

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 05/03/2026

If you see this, we IMPLORE you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 29/01/2026

Germany's progressive campaign group Campact started a petition to the European Commission to ban all ICE agents ("Trump's violent authority") from entering the EU for the Winter Olympics. After one day it's already at 119k signatures and still picking up steam. weact.campact.de/petitions/tr...

An: Kommissionspräsidentin Ursula von der Leyen und die EU-Kommission
Trump stoppen: Einreiseverbot für ICE-Agenten in die EU!
Gestartet von Anna di Bari
ICE STOPPEN
Einreisverbot für Trumps Gewaltbehörde in der EU jetzt!

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 27/01/2026

Took some notes so I can stay on point:

Talking points for calling senators
* Placing restrictions on ICE is not enough, the DHS has to be defunded. Call it a temporary pause if you need to.
* Compromising with the fascist GOP is stupid, they will not respect the rules you agree on.
* Kristi Noem and Steven Miller have got to go.
* Public opinion is with you, MAGA is in crisis, do not back down now with our democracy and our lives at stake. Your constituents and history will not be forgiving if you do.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 26/01/2026

Und sofort wird noch ein Jude (ich) vom „Arbeitskreis gegen Antisemitismus“ geblockt. Es handelte sich um diesen Post (das Bild stammt nicht von mir)

AK gegen
Arbeitskreis gege...
@akgegenantisem.bsky.social
Als erkennbare Mitglieder einer der ältesten antifaschistischen Organisationen hatten sie ihren Spaß daran, ein Banner mit der Aufschrift "FREE ANTIFA FROM ZIONISM" zu tragen. Frei übersetzt: "VVN JUDENFREI".
Als erkennbare Mitglieder einer der ältesten antifaschistischen
Organisationen hatten sie ihren Spaß daran, ein Banner mit der Aufschrift
"FREE ANTIFA FROM ZIONISM" zu tragen. Frei übersetzt: "VVN JUDENFREI".
2/3

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/01/2026

Hab mal die Bilder für Dokumentationszwecke heruntergeladen (🧵 1/4) (Kein Alttext weil zu viele Bilder und zu wenig Zeit, Verzeihung)

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/01/2026

mal kurz gesucht: hier der einzige bsky-post des typs mit "gaza" drin – vor fast 2 jahren, und nur um den genozid zu leugnen. (google war indes weniger ergiebig.) diese deutsche heuchelei ist nicht schwer zu ahnen, aber hier scheint meine ahnung sich bestätigt zu haben

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 17/01/2026

Kann man aus Wut lesen? Wenn, dann das

Mittlerweile ist viel Zeit vergangen und die Kritik muss sich zuspitzen. Wo Betrug konstatiert wird, wie im Titel dieses Buches, ist Entzug des Vertrauens geboten. Wer betrügt, irrt nicht, ihm ist jegliche Legitimität seines Anliegens abzusprechen. Weder taugen die Antideutschen als Kritikerinnen deutscher Verhältnisse, noch ist von ihnen irgendein kluger Gedanke zu erhaschen oder eine Theorie über die hiesigen oder gar internationalen Entwicklungen zu entnehmen; schon gar nicht über den Antisemitismus, den sie laufend beschwören. Sie sind mittlerweile Bestandteil eines politische Lager übergreifenden, Bürger- wie Staatenkriege bejahenden Blocks, der jeglicher Emanzipation, jeglichem Aufbruch, ja selbst der Verhinderung des Schlimmsten, das heißt einer autoritär-rechten Formierung von Gesellschaft und Staat, entgegensteht. Dieses Urteil mag irritieren. Es wird im Folgenden jedoch ausgeführt werden.

Buchumschlag: Die andere Querfront: Skizzen des antideutschen Betrugs, von Gerhard Hanloser (Unrast, 2019)

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 15/01/2026

This post is really an all-timer. Half an hour old but it will live forever. Screen shot for posterity.

Post by Norm Charlatan:
Me, reading and studying history: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me, realizing I am living through a historical event: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 15/01/2026

As Leipzig gears up for a confrontation between pro-Palestine protestors and weird German Israel fetish freaks, this unhinged violent poster was spotted in the city's beautiful northwest (zip code 04277). Using imagery evoking Israeli state violence to threaten local opponents is a familiar reflex>

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 10/12/2025

Klassische "deutsche-israelische Freundschaft" – nichts wissen wollende, vielleicht es doch gut meinende deutsche Linke helfen israelischen Rechtsextremen bei der Bekämpfung der Friedensgefahr. 👍

(Erste zwei Sätze hervorgehoben)
Derartige Reisen für Entscheidungsträger stehen in der Kritik, weil sie ein einseitiges Bild der politischen Lage in Israel vermitteln, auf Akteure aus Regierung, Militär und Siedlerbewegung fokussiert sind und kritische Stimmen weitgehend ausblenden. Sie werden auch innerhalb Israels genutzt, um den politischen Kurs der Regierung zu stützen. So diente die Reise der deutschen Delegation, die mit einem eigens dafür bemalten Flugzeug eingeflogen wurde, dem Außenminister und Likud-Politiker Gideon Saar als Anlass, um eine Rede gegen die Zweistaatenlösung in israelischen Medien zu platzieren – in der er einen künftigen palästinensischen Staat mit dem NS-Staat verglich.

Unter den Teilnehmenden der Großgruppe im November waren auch zwei Sprecher*innen der kürzlich gegründeten Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft (BAG) Shalom, die sich der Bekämpfung von »Antisemitismus und Antizionismus« in der Linkspartei verschreibt. Der innerparteiliche Zusammenschluss wurde nach eigener Darstellung von der israelischen Botschaft eingeladen, Mitglieder auf die Reise zu entsenden – deren Kosten sich auf mehrere tausend Euro pro Person belaufen dürften. Laut einem dem »nd« vorliegenden Dokument übernahm Israels Außenministerium sämtliche Kosten des Programms einschließlich Hin- und Rückflug, Hotelübernachtungen und Verpflegung.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 04/11/2025

lol tell me you're lying about reading marx without saying you're lying about reading marx

A: "I've read Marx it's all very pretty in his books isn't it"
B: "? What"
A: "They're very pretty ideas, but everywhere someone tries to force communism to magically "happen" it always ends in a bloody tyrannical takeover
Bc everyone can't do everything all the time! Best we can do is elect someone we know will fight for our collective interest & if they don't we vote em out"

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 15/10/2025

Wish I had known of this sticker (h/t @rabinova.bsky.social in Berlin) when I wrote this... 😳

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 09/09/2025

טיפה חדשות טובות, כמה שזה נחוץ עכשיו 🥹

טראמפ: אליזבט צורקוב, שהוחזקה בידי מיליציה פרו־איראנית בעיראק, שוחררה ונמצאת בשגרירות ארה"ב בבגדאד

נשיא ארצות הברית דונלד טראמפ הודיע כי אליזבט צורקוב, שהוחזקה בידי מיליציה פרו־איראנית בעיראק, שוחררה ונמצאת בשגרירות ארה"ב בבגדאד. צורקוב, בת 38, היא אשת אקדמיה ומומחית לענייני סוריה והמזרח התיכון, ובעלת אזרחות רוסית. היא נכנסה לעיראק בעזרת דרכונה הרוסי לצורך עבודת דוקטורט ומחקר אקדמי מטעם אוניברסיטת פרינסטון שבארה"ב, ונחטפה במרץ 2023.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 24/07/2025

Disturbing footage: Berlin police violently assaulting peaceful protestors for Palestine, today (July 24, 2025.) Credit: Unpublished.de (found on Instagram)

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 06/07/2025

Respectfully, this official IDF website is full of these: www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA...

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 12/06/2025

The question of antisemitism in political violence directed against support for Israel can seem impossibly tangled, even distasteful. I'm so grateful to Daniel May at @jewishcurrents.bsky.social who waded into it nonetheless, and teased it apart with such nuance. jewishcurrents.org/the-tangled-...

Article quote: I understand why some find the distinction irrelevant. Jews are being killed and attacked for their views; this is undeniably upsetting. "The very conversation-is this antisemitic or not— trivializes the issue," Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said on a recent podcast. "We Jews who support Israel are now being targeted by acts of violence. Does it matter whether somebody calls it antisemitism or not?" In a sense, Kurtzer is correct. The severity of the violence should, on its own, offer sufficient grounds for condemnation. Yet for American Jewish leaders and politicians, it clearly matters a great deal whether or not this violence is called "antisemitism."

Article quote: But if one's interest is the safety of Jews, then it's imperative to examine the motivation of the violence as stated by those that committed it. Doing so makes plain the uncomfortable but increasingly obvious fact that when associated with Jews as a whole, Israel's annihilatory campaign of indiscriminate bombing and starvation in Gaza puts Jews around the world in danger. Those committed to preventing such attacks should be working to stop that destruction and to refute that association.

Article quote: This knot - in which Zionism and Judaism merge so completely that opposition to Zionism becomes indistinct from opposition to Judaism - was tied at the birth of Zionism as a political program in the late 19th century. The early political Zionists were not only interested in creating a Jewish refuge, but in transforming what it meant to be Jewish. Leon Pinsker, whose 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation is often considered the first text of political Zionism, argued that legal equality in Europe was inherently unable to end discrimination against Jews because it couldn't make others see Jews as equal.

Article quote: ...there are clear reasons for hostility to Zionism. And if support for Israel is essential to being Jewish, then hostility to Israel necessarily entails hostility to Jews. The dynamic feeds on itself like an ouroboros: The hostility proves to Jews that antisemitism is a malignant and eternal force, which reinforces the idea that a militarized ethnostate is essential for Jewish safety, which increases support for that state's security, which leads to justifications for Israel's ongoing campaigns of dispossession, which increases the hostility. Rinse, repeat. This is why those that warn of an increasing threat to Jews are right to do so, even if they misattribute the reasons. Studies have long shown that as Israeli violence increases, so too does violence against Jews.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 07/06/2025

Da sich Tom mit Begriffen ein bissl schwer tut, habe ich freundlicherweise ein illustratives Beispiel für "Eternalismus" gefunden. Aus: Uhlig und Potter, "Israelhass und Antisemitismus", in: Judenhass Underground, Hrsg. Potter und Lauer, 2023, S.24

Auszug aus einem Text: "Israelbezogener Antisemitismus ist nicht etwas gänzlich anderes als die sonstigen Formen des Judenhasses. Im Gegenteil: Er bedient sich derselben Motive und Argumentationen wie der offene Antisemitismus. Monika Schwarz-Friesel beschreibt in ihrem Buch Judenhass im Internet das „Chamäleon Antisemitismus".
Dessen Kern bleibt immer gleich, doch seine Erscheinungsform ändert sich und passt sich historisch an die jeweilige Umwelt an.
Israelbezogener Antisemitismus bedient sich klassischer antisemitischer Motive wie dem Vorwurf der Verschlagenheit, Unmenschlichkeit, Gier und illegitimen Macht."

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 23/05/2025

80 Prozent gegen "Israels militärisches Vorgehen gegen die Hamas"! Man kann sich nur vorstellen, wie die Zahlen ausfallen würden, wenn das Framing etwa die Menschen vor Ort in den Mittelpunkt stellen würde.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 12/05/2025

Israels eigene Linkspartei begrüßt den Linke-BPT-Beschluss

Tweet von Hadash: „We support the decision by @dieLinke to adopt the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and encourage other parties to do the same.
The fight against antisemitism is critical, but it must not be used to silence necessary left criticism of Israel and its violent policies.“

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 12/05/2025

Zum Vergleich, die IHRA-Arbeitsdefinition, mit der Erweiterung, den die Bundesregierung daran hängt. Lest sie hier im Bild oder auf der offiziellen Website: www.antisemitismusbeauftragter.de/Webs/BAS/DE/... Wer definiert hier den Antisemitismus politisch um? Die Wissenschaftler oder die BuReg?

Die internationale Arbeitsdefinition von Antisemitismus lautet:

"Antisemitismus ist eine bestimmte Wahrnehmung von Juden, die sich als Hass gegenüber Juden ausdrücken kann. Der Antisemitismus richtet sich in Wort oder Tat gegen jüdische oder nichtjüdische Einzelpersonen und/oder deren Eigentum sowie gegen jüdische Gemeindeinstitutionen oder religiöse Einrichtungen."

Die Bundesregierung hat außerdem folgende Erweiterung verabschiedet:

"Darüber hinaus kann auch der Staat Israel, der dabei als jüdisches Kollektiv verstanden wird, Ziel solcher Angriffe sein."

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 12/05/2025

Obszön der Vorwurf, mit der Annahme der Jerusalemer Erklärung definiere man den Antisemitismus um. Lest einfach deren Definition: "Antisemitismus ist Diskriminierung, Vorurteil, Feindseligkeit oder Gewalt gegen Jüdinnen und Juden als Jüdinnen und Juden (oder jüdische Einrichtungen als jüdische)."

Antisemitismus ist Diskriminierung, Vorurteil, Feindseligkeit oder Gewalt gegen Jüdinnen und Juden als Jüdinnen und Juden (oder jüdische Einrichtungen als jüdische)

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 07/05/2025

Looks like this, in the settings

Image of the Apple Intelligence & Siri screen in macOS Settings

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 09/04/2025

If he’s pausing tariffs on most countries but raising them further on China, we’re still in very deep shit. Why are markets reacting as if this is an actual change of course?

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 08/04/2025

Fascinating and illuminating discussion of knowledge, technology, deskilling, and power (from Why We Fear AI @hagenblix.bsky.social )

A world dominated by such hypothetical tools would seem to have little room for humans to act purposefully on the world, or derive any meaning from life at all. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said: "Al will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.
"18 If the aim seems
absurd, we must remember that it represents the logical endpoint of one of capitalism's tendencies, the drive to deskill, to transfer knowledge from workers to machines, from humans to capital.
Speculations about AGI are, in this sense, speculations about the endpoint of the drive to deskill: ultimately targeting all human knowledge. That is not to say that this is a plausible outcome; there are many countervailing forces (not least the fact that we continually generate new knowledge and new tasks). Indeed, capitalism's relationship to knowledge is rather paradoxical: on the one hand, there is a tendency to universalize certain kinds of knowledge, to make sure everyone is in possession of it-since that, too, is a form of deskilling. That is, if everyone knows a thing, then no group of workers can gain special bargaining power from possessing that knowledge. We can take reading and writing as an example, and we could look at many lobbying efforts and political arguments over what should be included in school curricula through that lens. Even the investments that many big tech companies have been making into their own kind of schools, so-called coding academies, can be understood in the light of these universalizing pressures: make everyone into a programmer, and programmers can no longer demand higher-than-average wages.

The story of the transistor illustrated the changing nature of our tools: technological developments have increasingly severed our relationship to our tools' internal functioning. We suggested that we experience this as an increase in complexity. But what is that increasing and mysterious "complexity" other than knowledge that is purposefully embedded in the machine or the managerial apparatuses, in order to make it unnecessary for workers and users, for us, to understand it. After all, for every complex aspect of our technology, there is someone who understands, who does know.
Complexity is decidedly not the same as genuine incomprehensi-bility. That is not to say that the scale and differentiation of new scientific and technological knowledge have not played a part. But under capitalism, new knowledge, and in particular knowledge of tools and labor processes is continually and systematically put on a need-to-know basis, and often sealed off, as an effect of deskilling.

The vanishing of our tools' comprehensibility is not simply an accidental byproduct of technological development. The closing off of our tools from view serves a particular purpose—to increase the power of one class, the owners of those tools, over the other one, those who work with them. These economic pressures and developments end up affecting all kinds of tools, whether they are capital or consumer goods. From computers to DNA testing services, many things do, after all, transition from one domain to the other, as their prices fall, and new uses are invented. If the backs of our smartphones are literally and figuratively glued shut, then this is not simply an inevitable side effect of technological development, but about locking knowledge behind closed doors, and sealed backs, about putting knowledge on a need-to-know basis. In other words, it is the fact that knowledge is power-the power to bargain for higher wages, and better working conditions, or the power to decrease wages, and increase capital's profit and control over work-that made our tools into what they are: objects whose complexity enables us to be ever more productive, but that also continually shift power from workers to capital.
The vanishing of our tool's internal functioning went hand in hand with a rise of innumerable and ever larger bureaucracies, even as we lived in times dominated by a neoliberal self-justification of capitalism that perpetually claims to be opposed to bureaucracies.
Such justifications even claim …

…in productivity economically feasible, that's what it will do-and wherever deskilling is economically feasible, that's what it will do.
Deskilling, however, requires that knowledge be put on a need-to-know basis, transferred away from workers and embedded in managerial and specialist bureaucracies. At first, this may only create managerial bureaucracies. But soon, even engineers that started out as purely technical specialists are more and more involved in the planning of production processes, in gathering knowledge to exercise control. Wherever oversight is transformed into a technological property of tools (from the steam engine to the Amazon Al), engineers become techno-managers. Nowhere are engineering departments concerned solely with productivity, they are concerned with costs per piece, and hence they turn into techno-bureaucracies. Management and technical specialists start forming mixed bureaucracies: technology and management, tools and control are ever more deeply intertwined. And whenever those bureaucratic structures get big enough, the same principles of deskilling are applied internally as well. A process of recursive deskilling and bureaucracy creation unfolds, and is unfolding every day. The managerial pyramid turns into a professional-managerial pyramid. It grows incessantly, as long as it can keep overall wages down and make sure that the ever increasing productivity is turned into profit-and never into social wealth, into more interesting and engaging workplaces, or into simply more free time.

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Michael Sappir @m.sappir.net · 04/04/2025

Yeah I refuse to believe this shit is in earnest

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