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  • 65 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: January 12th, 2025
  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoWorld News@lemmy.world•Vermont Judge Orders Release of Tufts University Student Rumeysa Ozturk Detained by ICE Over pro-Palestinian ViewsEnglish
    4·
    9 hours ago

    There’s something very wrong with that study design. Look at the actual questions they asked: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/2921c434-f7d7-43f4-ade6-3a5591444c85/downloads/83704423-9e76-43d7-a876-975f4a267df1/12-24 Interview Schedule.pdf?

    Look on page 10.

    1. Anti-Zionist movements are antisemitic by definition: 70% say that describes their beliefs well or very well
    2. Anti-Zionist movements are not antisemitic by definition: 50% say that describes their beliefs well for very well.

    Then items X3: 53% disagree with the statement that opposing Israeli government policy is antisemitic.

    Or Item 42:

    It is possible to be a strong supporter of Israel and also protest their attacks that lead to the harm or death of civilians in Lebanon or Gaza. 74% agree with this statement. In the next item 68% state that Israel will only be safe when a two-state solution has been established.

    The sample that “The Jewish Majority” used was likely wildly unrepresentative of America’s overall Jewish population. This can be seen in their question on religious service attendance.

    Only 20% of American Jews attend service monthly or more frequently. Meanwhile, the 37% of The Jewish Majority’s respondents attend service at least once a month. (Item 47.) This indicates that their sample severely over-represents highly religiously active members of the Jewish community. Their report doesn’t state how they recruited their sample, but it seems likely they did so through outreach at synagogues or other spaces that would select for the most religious and heavily practicing of American Jews.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoWorld News@lemmy.world•Vermont Judge Orders Release of Tufts University Student Rumeysa Ozturk Detained by ICE Over pro-Palestinian ViewsEnglish
    11·
    11 hours ago

    Only the most vile of antisemites conflates Zionism with Judaism. Antisemites believe that Jews are fundamentally foreigners, regardless of where they are born or how they live. An antisemitic American believes that Jews have an intrinsic loyalty and connection to the state of Israel, and any criticism of that hard right government is an attack on Judaism itself. To antisemites, Jews cannot be true Americans. Their loyalty is always suspect. This is the logic of the Japanese internment camps in WW2.

    This logic states that if relations between Israel and the US are good, that attacks on Zionism are to be fought as an attack on all Jewish Americans. But this logic also demands that if relations ever sour between Israel and the US, persecution of American Jews is fully justified, as Jews cannot be real Americans.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoWorld News@lemmy.world•'Andrew Tate phenomena' surges in schools - with boys refusing to talk to female teacherEnglish
    6·
    18 days ago

    Honestly, at this point, I’m on board with just banning social media algorithms entirely. No more personalized feeds. You can have a website that publishes whatever you want, but you can’t tailor individual feeds to individual people. People can replace their “feed” with what the original internet was meant to be - visiting a series of websites. Want to read nothing but right wing blogs? Fine. You can spend all day navigating to different URLs for them. But no more spoon feeding individually personalized content to people.

    It turns out that method of content delivery is just a very dangerous and damaging technology that really fucks with the workings of the human mind. If you tell AI to build an ideal feed model for a person, it builds a nightmare that traps human beings in skinner boxes.

    We can ban these algorithms. We don’t have to continue to tolerate their existence. And in the grand scheme of history, it would be no different than a thousand other things that we discovered, at first thought was a panacea, but eventually decided the benefits weren’t worth the costs. Asbestos is a fantastic fireproof insulator, but we willingly let those benefits go in lieu of its severe respiratory effects. DDT is an incredible pest killer and insecticide, but it also was rendering entire species of birds extinct. Targeted, individually tailored social media algorithms create entertainment feeds that can entertain us to such degrees that the kings of old would lament their jesters in comparison. But what these algorithms are doing to us, what they are doing to our society? On political polarization? The effects they are having not just on children, but of people of all ages? We as a society need to recognize that the benefits just aren’t worth the costs. We are tearing our civilization apart for the sake of cheap entertainment.

    We need to ban targeted social media feeds. We have faced technologies like this before. We have made the choice before to give up the benefits of these things for the sake of the greater good. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. It is time we ban targeted social media feeds.