LarmyOfLone

They are drafted, and refusing to serve is not easy, and they are inundated by propaganda. And yeah reparations, land reform, wealth redistribution all would need to happen.

And if you're taking about the recent settlements (say like up to 20 years ago) and dispossession of Palestinians, yeah I agree. But there is a "statue of limitations". You can't unravel history. Humans in general who live somewhere and have build their lives deserve protection - no matter how they got there or what shitty and vile opinions they hold. It's not a property dispute if you want to apply this to a whole nation.

Personally I don't see this ending well. There are about a billion climate refugees coming in the next decades and things will get much worse generally. Israel will probably become isolated and eventually loose USA support and use their nuclear weapons. But after than it's quite possible Israel will indeed end with another holocaust. But I see no reason to hope for or argue in favor of that.

Yeah with advances in software and AI you could also manage the economy much more efficient and in real time than the old "planned economy". Shortages and problems could be handled quickly. With crowd funding you could also have banks providing funds for new enterprises (collectives / coops) by people voting democratically on what to approve.

The issue is that I haven't seen any serious work on improving socialism, which most socialists seem to think is a heretical concept. So there is a lack of valid alternatives to capitalism that people can imagine. And the power balance and technology for propaganda to control the population and weaponry and tactics the stage manage protests has advanced too.

And then there is the issue that no matter what ideology and system, those who desire power or wealth above anything else are more likely to attain it, and we haven't yet found good antibodies to this fundamental problem of managing power. Or even know about it.

Conglomerates spend oodles of money on advertising to maintain their brands as well. They have to. Ban on advertising would dramatically shift the balance of power. More innovating and better products can come to market without needing as much capital. You'd still have channels to review and inform about new products, which would now be a (more) fair competition.

Advertising might be similarly harmful as lead in drinking water.

Do rural jokels not have phones already? It's not like you wouldn't have product announcements and news and forum discussing it.

Online stores would be the exact wrong place imho. Take amazon, it become a outdated and rotten because of advertising changing the ranking and fake reviews and endless duplicates of items. There is also a lack of advancement for filtering. You'd want more trustworthy reviews, information, measurements and also more community functions to help find what you really need. Advertising would run counter to all of that.

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions. Currently you need a lot of capital to market a new product. That shifts the balance of power away from entrepreneurs towards the capitalists. Marketing also has a larger impact on profits than engineering, which leads to non-engineers to gain more promotions and power.

Instead we could have reviews, testing institutions, forums where people exchange opinions. And "pay for play" would be illegal fraud. But there would be constant demand to learn and compare the quality of products, once the focus on emotional manipulation is gone.

And existing brands from conglomerates spend oodles of money to maintain their brands, so you would immediately see a shift in power towards entrepreneurs and new and better products. You'd gain far more than you'd loose.

Another issue is that we are hyperstimulating consumerism which has not just negative effects, but leads to existential risk now.

You also can't escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.

I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.

Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.

PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie "Branded (2012)" which dramatizes this idea.

Of course, two wrongs don't make it right! You can't hold the people living in an area collectively responsible for the actions of their regime (past or present). They are human beings.

I am angry too and I agree that the regime and a majority of the population of Israel has become fascist along with decades of crimes, terrorism and oppression, and should fall and be "de-nazied" like in Germany. But that is unlikely anytime soon. Best we can do is sanction them to collapse and punish those who support this regime.

The issue is that the fascist assault also has an impact on all of us, by making us angry and wish for simple solutions. Don't play into their hands by validating their claims about the "radical left".

There were many historically German language areas in Poland and Czechia. There was in fact atrocities and ethnic cleansing there - not that this deserves any pity for most of the "former NAZIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)

After 50 years I don't think any reasonable person can make the argument that removing Jews from Israel is anything but ethnic cleansing. Not that I'd have any pity on those zionist fascists either, BUT it's beyond the pale to feign outrage over your "innocent comment" if this is your true opinion.

YDI

they do it while dehumanizing people and devaluing humanity

You're making wild assumptions about people who disagree with your opinions. How ironic you accuse "them" of dehumanizing people.

But I do agree that this gets to the core of the matter, the shock of a piece of software being able to produce intelligent text while clearly not having general intelligence is quite the shock. Same with creativity, while the entertainment industry produced equally empty content slop using human labor it's a painful shock to our identity as humans. I suspect this is a reaction to disillusionment and the intellectual pain that comes from it.

My opinion on LLMs is rather nuanced, the worst possible outcome I can foresee is the anti-AI crowd helping the oligarchs to establish IP ownership of all LLM models and monopolizing the tools, so that only they can have access to the "means of generation". While the rest has to pay for the privilege of using it.