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Midwest Molly's avatar

They are going after Hamas. We have no way of knowing how many of the hostages are even still alive.

I think the massive Palestinian protests going on in the USA are actually having the opposite effect they intend. Thousands of people chanting for Jews to be killed ( from the river to the sea ) is deeply unsettling to normal Americans. I think it is going to lead to real political consequences for the Dems.

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That TERF Owl's avatar

Yeah, seeing those people scaling the fence at the White House (just when they got Major out of there...), climbing up Ben Franklin's statue, and vandalizing monuments... that doesn't play well outside of the echo chambers the protestors live in.

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Gila Weiss's avatar

I'm really curious to know what percentage of Americans (e.g. not just Democrats) support Hamas/ Palestinians here. The %'s I see seem to focus on Democrats/ the left, as though there weren't also a right wing. Might be hopelessly naive, but I'm hoping that a broader count would be a little bit less pro-terrorist.

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JesterColin's avatar

The CCP is deliberately warping the Tiktok algorithm to forcefeed the English speaking world anti-Israel propaganda. Xi Jinping isn’t a Jihadist, obviously, but he does everything in his power to sow discord in the West to give him a better chance of success at seizing the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan.

What effect is this having? Unfortunately, probably a lot among young people if the amount of time I hear they spend on that platform is correct.

I’m 31 and know people my age and older generally across the political spectrum, and all the people I know except for those who fell into the “woke” trap post 2017 could probably be considered “Pro-Israel”.

If there are any college age people in the comments section, I would be curious to hear the extent of this.

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TwKaR's avatar

`The CCP is deliberately warping the Tiktok algorithm'

Source? I don't even think that accessing American user data is easy for the CCP, let alone changing the algorithm .

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JesterColin's avatar

The CCP can access any user data it wants. “Stored in the US” doesn’t mean “Inaccessible from anywhere outside the US”.

Frankly my main source is they would be idiots not to be doing that and Xi is many things, but he ain’t stupid.

I’ll give one example of a different platform doing this. ‘Project Owl’, which Google implemented to mess with their search algorithm to boost “authoritarive sources” to fight “misinformation”, which was really just to get the Democratic Party off their backs during Russiagate. Google messes with their algorithms all the time.

I like to play a game called “I want the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. What should I do?”

Well, one longterm strategy you do is with the social media you control, shatter the social cohesion of your enemies by massively separating the beliefs of those who use your platform (the youth) and those who don’t (older people). The default is Pro-Israel? Push Pro-Palestine. Every aspect of what is called “woke”, for lack of a better term, gets amplified, which is useful because it can divide young from old better. A country’s soldiers are by definition young, can’t have them being stoic and patriotic, now can you? Is much of this organic? Of course. You can’t build a good psyop out of thin air, but Chinese Tiktok is very very different than Western Tiktok. Western Tiktok is an ingenious weapon of psychological warfare. This doesn’t mean I think it should be banned outright, I don’t like banning things, but it’s important to know what it is.

Never before in our lifetimes have there been 2 superpowers focused on 1 specific thing, the most valuable resource of all time, the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. I’m not saying that’s the lens you should look at Everything, that way lies madness, but it’s a useful lens to see the proxies within proxies for this terrifyingly inevitable, apocalyptic battle for who controls the island on which modern civilization is built.

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TwKaR's avatar

OK, so you were just asserting your opinion. You have no evidence, only speculation, that the CCP is influencing TikTok.

The last I heard was that internal safeguards make it at least difficult to access data about US users. Maybe you have something more up-to-date?

`I like to play a game called “I want the semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan. What should I do?”'

Invest in local fabrication plants and, if you're China, steal information about how TSMC operates. Both the US and China are reinvesting in semiconductor fabrication technology because the supply chain crisis highlighted how bad of an idea it is rely on a single country for the most advanced chips.

That's much cheaper than starting a war.

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JesterColin's avatar

I don’t need to have anything up to date around safeguards. C-Suite executives at Bytedance have admin access to Tiktok, they have to otherwise they wouldn’t be able to run the company.

They are in China. If you are in China, Xi can say “I want all the info on ‘x’ person or your family goes into a Uyghur camp.”

And your reinvestment idea sounds rock-solid, couple problems though. First, to actually recreate what Taiwan has made would take trillions, not 10,s of billions of dollars, and at least 5 years. “Ok” you may ask “but that costs less than WW3”.

And you would be correct, but you’re missing the most important variable: AI

As Putin has said many times, whoever gets AI first, rules the world, because if your military can effectively predict the future, no amount of nukes can destroy you.

America is ahead of China in AI and has blocked advanced chips related to AI being exported to China. Xi is on a clock, time is very much against him. If he wants his chance for China to be the sole superpower, and for himself to practically rule the world (just imagine how tempting for a megalomaniac that must be), he either needs to seize the plants or destroy them before China falls hopelessly behind on AI.

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TwKaR's avatar

ByteDance has put in safeguards surrounding data access as they are trying not to be forced to sell TikTok.

One doesn't need access to that data to run the company. Summary statistics are all that C-Suite executives need to know about.

`They are in China. If you are in China, Xi...'

Agreed but that's in China.

`First, to actually recreate what Taiwan has made would take trillions'

The market capitalization of TSMC is ~$445 billion so we won't be needing trillions.

`you’re missing the most important variable: AI'

Meh. I do research in AI and we haven't been able to get automated vehicles to stay on the road in situations a 14 year old can handle, despite 20 years of R&D and hundreds of billions of dollars, so I'm not worried about it.

AI, in general, isn't about predicting the future; we sometimes use it for that but it's not what's behind, say, ChatGPT.

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JesterColin's avatar

I do appreciate the pushback though, this Jester doesn’t just want to be in an echo chamber. Interesting though, isn’t it, that in a sense, our disagreement was over which one of our predictions of the future was correct. In my mind, that’s what just about everything is about; who can best predict the future.

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JesterColin's avatar

Interesting, from one AI guy to another, we will end up endlessly disagreeing because we have a fundamental disagreement of where AI is heading.

A little last story if I may. I first worked with machine learning back in 2016 at a 3D printing company, previously had never cared about AI, but when told “we don’t know how it works” my eyes went wide. It was probably one of the most formative moments of my life.

From then on I would occasionally irritate people about what was coming, basically I’d get called crazy. If, in March of 2022 you asked me when I thought things as powerful as Stable Diffusion or Vicuna LLM wouldn’t just exist, but would be free and open-source, I, the crazy one, would’ve told you the 2030’s. Maybe your predictions were better than mine, but people consider me an AI maximalist but I keep being off by a factor of 10 in the other direction.

Yann LeCun is a personal hero of mine, what he has done with open-sourcing Meta’s AI deserves giving him the Nobel Peace Prize honestly, but I think he’s incorrect about the capabilities coming. I think Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction of the Wall of Fog coming in 2028 is more accurate. For this discussion, neither of us can read Xi’s mind, so we don’t know what school of AI thought he falls into.

But ask yourself, at various times in your life, when did you think something like ChatGPT would be free? Then be plugged into the internet? How about Stable Diffusion?

Mentally going back, how accurate were your predictions? Extrapolate those out. That’s why I believe Hinton over LeCun.

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Stephanie's avatar

That is my perception too, but I am far from college age. My workplace is not super woke, but it is solidly liberal, and the sentiment is firmly on Israel's side among most.

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Stephanie's avatar

Here's a poll that breaks it down by party: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-israel-ukraine/

You have to scroll down, and they use "Palestinian people" which is going to get a more positive answer than Hamas. Americans are still broadly sympathetic to Israel, with Rs more so, as you correctly assumed.

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Reuven's avatar

I think you're right!

You know the very real "woke" backlash that Democrats pretended didn't exit?

The backlash to the Pro-Hamas/Palestine crowd is coming even faster. It took years for anti-woke to move out of the fringes of the right into the middle. It's only taking a month with respect to the Pro-Hamas folks before I'm seeing pushback from the middle.

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TwKaR's avatar

`from the river to the sea' is *not* a call for genocide and it's ridiculous that the right is attempting to frame it that way.

It is a call for a one state solution with equality for all. When Fatah started using that slogan they were calling explicitly for a single nation of Arabs and Jews. They dropped it/didn't use it as much when they agreed in principle to seek a two state solution (this resulted in much backlash for Fatah). After that it was used in a general way to express freedom and equality for the Palestinian people.

Seeing as how Israel made a two state solution impossible, what with settler activity, etc., the slogan has again become relevant again and reverted to its original meaning.

I heard no Jew hatred at the rally over the weekend. The protestors were regular Americans, young and old, mostly black and brown, some naturalized but most first or second generation Palestinian American, and the idea that they hate Jews let alone want to murder them if fantastical.

Pleasant, nice, regular people.

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Midwest Molly's avatar

I so hope that this is the way most feel. It would be wonderful if they could all just live in peace together.

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Zagarna's avatar

I fully concede that the American public's political responses to stimuli often make no sense (e.g. getting super-mad at Obama for a recession caused by Republicans), but it would be weird to blame Democrats for not being sufficiently pro-Israel when I quite literally do not know how they could possibly be more pro-Israel than they actually are. Like what additional pro-Israel actions would people even want? Sending American ground troops into Gaza?

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