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Eye-opening video.
This war has been eye-opening for the world. People are awakening to see how the imperialist colonialist powers have abused the Palestinian people.
I apologize for not posting much here in recent months comrades! I've focused more on our fellow NSLeft communities' off-site spaces in recent years and our region has languished. This year I'd like to build up our activity again, cultivate high-quality discussion, and clear some of the cobwebs from the region in terms of organization. I welcome other comrades' suggestions on direction for the region.
UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/unrwa-report-says-israel-coerced-some-agency-employees-falsely-admit-hamas-links-2024-03-08/
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Monument to Ukrainian soldiers who served under Nazis removed from Canadian cemetery
Controversy over the marker resurfaced in the aftermath of veteran honored by Parliament
https://forward.com/fast-forward/590768/ukrainian-soldiers-nazi-monument-canada/
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Where Do Haitian Gangs Come From & What Do They Want? Al Jazeera Interviews Kim Ives on Mar 11, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGdfbjFHhG8
I would also like to apologize for my lack of activity as of late. I made a grandiose post last year about really committing myself to this region, but I haven't followed through because I've had some unexpected personal commitments (namely a bereavement). I also used to greatly enjoy providing news from West Asia, but with the recent events I just feel emotionally exhausted.
I highly recommend this report from The Tricontinental Institute called "Hyper-Imperialism". I have my pedantic disagreements with certain aspects, but overall it expresses many of the same thoughts I've been having over the last several years (and then some). It contains a lot of information on multipolarity/polycentrism/whatever you want to call it in one place while elaborating on its opportunities and limitations.
https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/
UK Conservatives say their biggest donor made racist comments, but they’re not giving back his money
https://apnews.com/article/uk-conservative-party-donor-racism-936fd1bb71e0bc58c3992299cb9deabf
Exclusive: Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-launched-cia-covert-influence-operation-against-china-2024-03-14/
Niger revokes military accord with US, junta spokesperson says
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/niger-revokes-military-accord-with-us-junta-spokesperson-says-2024-03-16/
Not the most original thesis, but this is well-written piece focusing on heavy dependency on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers as the primary drivers of food shortages in the DPRK in the 90s. I think the author's ecological emphasis loses sight of the bigger picture here though:
"If a society plans to phase out fossil fuels and intense chemical applications, it implies we have to keep a considerable level of human physical labor in farming and other activities and a robust and populous countryside."
I'm certainly critical of the notion we can just stick a solar panel and battery on farm equipment and call it a day but this presents existing technological constraints as indefinite. Worse, it abandons previous Marxists' work outlining the conditions that bring "an end to both the division of material and mental labor and the separation of town and country", elucidated well by Stalin in Economic Problems of the USSR (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch13.htm). Maybe I'm misinterpreting the author, they don't detail their prescriptions much, but the presentation of an ecological socialism potentially requiring longer working hours and more people exclusively in agriculture implies it would reinforce the division of labor. The author notes how the heavy mechanization of the DPRK's agriculture benefited it at times, so I'm surprised they don't consider deeper reasons behind why twentieth-century socialists focused on it beyond meeting their immediate needs.
Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea
https://monthlyreview.org/2024/03/01/industrial-agriculture-lessons-from-north-korea/
Building off my last post, note that this new greenhouse is meant to save land and labor, to increase productivity.
Kim Jong Un and Daughter Attend Commissioning Ceremony of Kangdong Greenhouse Complex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMyI7kgJ3Y4
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KCNA Detailed Report on Construction of Kangdong Greenhouse Complex
Pyongyang, March 17 (KCNA) -- The Korean Central News Agency Saturday released a detailed report on the successful construction of the Kangdong Greenhouse Complex as the world's leading vegetable producer.
The detailed report said that the soldier-builders, involved in the construction of the greenhouse complex, successfully completed the world's leading vegetable production base, whose building scale and production capacity is nearly twice as big as those of the Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm, and whose intensive, optimum and intelligent levels have been remarkably enhanced, in just one year after the start of the construction, thus bringing about the significant moment of commissioning.
The respected General Secretary Kim Jong Un, a direct initiator and builder of the complex, clearly indicated the strategy and ways for completing the project as soon as possible, including site selection, formation of building forces and supply of materials, and personally guided the building project, the report said, and went on:
The loyalty, patriotic enthusiasm and sky-high spirit peculiar to the People's Army brought about miracles and feats from the beginning of construction.
Socialist emulation intensified amid the brisk frontline-style information and motivation work. New methods were invented and introduced to speed up the project by several times and the ranks of skilled workers increased. As a result, the framework and infrastructure construction of greenhouse blocks were successfully completed and the construction of management, production and public buildings was rapidly carried out.
Holding aloft such slogans of faith as "Let's report the motherly Party Central Committee on the successful completion of the large-scale greenhouse farm and present it to the beloved people" and "Forward for our great people's wellbeing!", the soldier-builders dedicated their gem-like conscience, blood and sweat to every structure and ensured the speed and quality of construction in the face of ordeals and difficulties.
The miracles and feats performed by the soldier-builders are associated with the warm sincerity of the service team made up of hundreds of service personnel's wives.
Officials and workers across the country made a positive contribution to the building project in concert with the hard-working soldiers in Kangdong.
The service personnel of the People's Army successfully wrapped up the large-scale greenhouse complex construction, which was said to take several years by existing formulas, in a matter of one year and perfected the preparations for its commissioning, and reported to the Party Central Committee on their loyalty and victory.
The modern, advanced, convenient and unique Kangdong Greenhouse Complex, where various kinds of vegetables including tasty and nutritious green, fruit-bearing and functional vegetables are mass-produced, is a grand monumental edifice in the great era of Kim Jong Un that subordinates and orients everything to promoting the people's well-being and dynamically ushers in a period of comprehensive socialist development with the Korean-style creative spirit.
As long as there are the extraordinary leadership of the great Party Central Committee, the reliable and proud service personnel of the People's Army with absolute loyalty as the original nature of their life and the great people who support the Party with their single-minded efforts, the world-startling miracles and epochal changes in the DPRK will continue to happen and comprehensive rejuvenation of the country will gain fresh momentum.
http://www.kcna.kp/en/article/q/5a4125c8e983da2d61f5a2de756cbf63.kcmsf
IRGC launches retaliatory attack on 'Israel' with 10s drones, missiles
Hundreds of Iranian drones and missiles are reportedly heading toward Israeli-occupied territories, according to Israeli media.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/irgc-launches-retaliatory-attack-on--israel--with-10s-drones
AI chatbots: Hype meets reality
https://mronline.org/2024/04/29/ai-chatbots/
"Artificial Intelligence seems to be everywhere. ... It seems like magic. And with everything supposedly happening “in the cloud,” it is easy to believe that AI-powered systems are good for the environment. Unfortunately, things are not as they appear to be.
Chatbots are built on exploitation, use massive amounts of energy, and are far from reliable. And while it is easy to imagine them growing in sophistication and making life easier in some respects, companies are pouring billions of dollars into their creation to make profits with little concern about whether the results will be socially beneficial. In short, we need to take the corporate interest in AI seriously and develop strategies that can help us gain control over how AI is developed and used."
This is one of the clearest articles I've seen explaining the common and dangerous misconceptions about supposed "Artificial Intelligence" tech (generative AI). Bourgeois media and even many alternative media sources all too often parrot the hype about AI's supposed abilities and effectiveness even when criticizing the technology! This article does a really good job of clearly and succinctly explaining the biggest misconceptions and major problems with the current generation of generative AI technology.
While some of these facts may seem like a given for those who are already aware, I think it's important to break down these misconceptions and link them to the current crises capitalism faces. Most criticism that is available focuses on the issues of copyright theft and bias so I'm going to focus on some other important aspects that get less attention though I highly recommend reading the whole article to get a fuller picture that includes discussion of those issues.
Below are a few highlights from the article with some personal commentary and rantings.
The model doesn’t “know” what it’s saying, but it does know what symbols (words) are likely to come after one another based on the data set it was trained on. The current generation of artificial intelligence chatbots, such as ChatGPT, its Google rival Bard and others, don’t really make intelligently informed decisions; instead, they’re the internet’s parrots, repeating words that are likely to be found next to one another in the course of natural speech. The underlying math is all about probability."
I sighed with relief when I read this, because somehow, despite reading dozens and dozens of articles both mainstream and critical about AI over the last several years, this is the first time I've seen somebody spell out as clear as day the exact understanding I have of the fundamentals of how generative AI works. Almost no journalistic articles explain this to their audience clearly and forcefully.
This is essential to understanding that, to make a dialectical analogy, the current boom in AI is not primarily a change of quality (in this case the fundamental functioning or paradigm of AI) but one of quantity. Quantity of data input, quantity of time to output, quantity of energy consumed, quantity of human labor input, these are the factors that make the current generation of AI distinct. But there is nothing intelligent or mysterious about it. Really its all just calculating the probability that a particular word or letter following the previous letter. Or if it is associated with a particular arrangement of pixels. The difference between a chatbot and a person doing this is quantity, of inputs, outputs, and time.
A.I. has a supply chain like any other technology; there are inputs that go into the creation of this technology, data being one, and then computational power or computer chips being another. And both of those have a lot of human costs associated with them."
...
"Chatbots cannot make direct use of much of the data gathered by web crawlers and scrapers. As Josh Dzieza explains,
behind even the most impressive AI system are people–huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused.
Major AI companies generally hire other smaller companies to find and train the workers needed for the data labeling process. And these subcontractors, more often than not, find their workers, called annotators, in the Global South, often in Nepal and Kenya."
...
"As Dzieza reports, this is “difficult and repetitive work. A several-second blip of footage took eight hours to annotate, for which [the annotator] was paid about $10.”
This kind of work, although low paid, is critical. If the annotation process is poorly done or the database is limited, the system can easily fail. A case in point: in 2018, a woman was struck and killed by a self-driving Uber car. The AI system failed because although “it was programmed to avoid cyclists and pedestrians, it didn’t know what to make of someone walking a bike across the street.”
Chatbots are often presented in bourgeois media as primarily a danger to specific sets of skilled labor. This is partially true but the reasoning behind it is missing its true context. Generative AI is not uniquely creating content or performing services using purely energy or computational power as an input. In fact, it is just like all advances in capitalist production. The massive concentration of capital in the form of data-centers and the infrastructure of the internet allows the major digital monopolies and their competitors to use a larger deskilled and super-exploited workforce to mass produce digital goods and services at a higher economy of scale.
Add to this the massive theft from both the digital commons and natural resources, and it becomes clear that generative AI is not some miraculous technology, but like all advances in automation, essentially functions to extend the relative-productivity of labor and depends on massive concentrations of labor and natural resources, an ever increasing amount of them. What is really different, is that the supposed products of this production process (unlike say steel, or a car, or a phone or clothes) are so marginally useful and/or are downright dangerous (using generative AI for medical advice, automated driving, military, etc), inept (use in education, coding, and customer service), or socially noxious compared to its exponentially growing negative environmental and social impact that objectively speaking it is hard to see what value it has outside of a small number of highly specialized uses (eg mapping proteins).
This makes it seem likely that the main impetus behind the major investment in generative AI is as a speculative bubble to squeeze more value out of labor and by inserting the technology everywhere even where its useless growing the bubble larger and larger. The quote below puts it well:
"Clearly major tech companies are betting that AI will generate huge profits for them. And leaving nothing to chance, they are doing all they can to embed them in our lives before we have the opportunity to consider whether we want them."
the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.
According to the International Energy Agency, the 2,700 data centers operating in the U.S. were responsible for more than 4 percent of the nation’s total energy use in 2022. And their share is likely to hit 6 percent by 2026. Of course such estimates are rough, both because the major tech companies are unwilling to share relevant information and because AI systems are continually being trained on new data and upgraded with more skills, meaning greater energy use per activity."
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"A 2024 report by several climate action groups on the climate threat posed by AI finds that the doubling of energy use by data centers, which the International Energy Agency estimates will happen over the next two years, will lead to an 80 percent increase in planet-heating emissions. This is a severe price to pay for new AI services that are being rolled out regardless of their ability to meet real, rather than created, needs."
"Clearly major tech companies are betting that AI will generate huge profits for them. And leaving nothing to chance, they are doing all they can to embed them in our lives before we have the opportunity to consider whether we want them."
There are some other issues this article didn't touch on, such as the impact of generative AI in coding and programming and on digital literacy. And also it didn't explicitly debunk the diversionary and entirely imagined dangers presented by questionably motivated tech "experts" who warn the public that generative AI is supposedly so advanced we're heading into some skynet/matrix apocalypse. But as I hope this article helps explain, the generative AI boom is incredibly dangerous and important to address, but for entirely real and immediate reasons.
The Political Organisation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)
https://staging.thetricontinental.org/dossier-75-landless-workers-movement-brazil/
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