F**king Mondays: Approaching The Abyss

Hamas and Israel update, finding empathy, and VR contact lenses!

Approaching the abysss

Welcome to this week’s edition of “F**king Mondays”! In the round up today:

To negotiate, or not to negotiate

This is an absolutely fascinating interview with Gershon Baskin, the Middle East director for the International Communities Organization and former peace negotiator. According to Baskin, who is still able to speak with senior Hamas figures, the Islamic terrorist group is beginning to “understand the severity of their situation”. With Israel poised to make a land invasion of Gaza, this means the total obliteration of Hamas.

Unfortunately Baskin doesn’t believe this means they are going to cede ground to Israel or give up hostages. Instead, he believes Hamas is going resort to desperate and extreme measures. “They’ve said to me: “We are not afraid to die, we are going to fight to death,”” Baskin told CBC (Canada Broadcasting Corporation).

This is decidedly bad news for, well, everyone. If Hamas executes the hostages Israel will respond with unthinkable ferocity. This means Israel will almost certainly operate outside of the internationally recognized rules of war and pay little attention to civilian casualties.

Negotiators from several countries are now desperately trying to facilitate some sort of deal between the Israeli government and Hamas. The humanitarian situation in Gaza is escalating at breakneck speed and it risks spreading the conflict to the region at large. The consequences of this are unthinkable, so the need clever diplomacy is pressing. Qatar is set to play an outsized role in negotiations give its position as a deal facilitator in the region.

This is unlikely to happen while Israel continues to bomb targets in Gaza, but pressure from the families of hostages might soon force the Knesset to the negotiating table. Similarly, pressure from Arab governments might make Hamas back down from its nihilistic position.

Given Hamas has not made statements about the status of the hostages, there is good reason to believe that they are a) alive and b) Hamas will negotiate, probably in the form of some sort of prisoner swap. I don’t believe any of this will prevent Israel’s invasion of Gaza, but it might delay it enough to allow more civilians to leave Gaza city and some of the Israeli hostages to be released.

Finding empathy

In desperate times like this I think it is extremely important to make a conscious effort to find empathy for people you disagree with. I have to admit that the images of Jewish families murdered by Hamas terrorists has made finding empathy for Palestinian victims difficult for me. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I feel I have more pressing issues to tend to. Let me try to explain.

After a warning from our local county, we decided to keep our five year old home last Friday due to Hamas’s call for a world wide “day of vengeance” on Jews. He has a distinctly Jewish name so we decided not to risk it.

When faced with realities of antisemitic violence like this, tribal instincts kick in and I have found myself taking more extreme positions than I normally would. It’s an “us vs them” mentality that I know can only lead to more conflict. So I am doing my best not to fall down this rabbit hole. The differences between Jews and Palestinians are entirely fictitious — culture, language and religion have nothing to do with our basic human biology, so I know that Jewish life is no more important than Palestinian life. If I stop believing this then I will become what I profess to hate. It’s a struggle, but one worth engaging with.

Good guys and bad guys?

The grotesque antisemitism I have been seeing on the identity politics left is, I believe, largely a product of an extremely shallow understanding of history. David Frum’s tweet sums this up perfectly. The political ideologues who casually label Jews “white supremacists” also seem to believe only European countries were involved in colonialism and imperialism. As Frum goes on to note, this “obliterates most of the history of the human race.” This isn’t an apology for Western colonialism, but to note that every tribe, civilization, and nation state on earth has engaged in murder, enslavement or subjugation of a native population.

Left wing academia is rife with this sort of nonsense, and unfortunately it seems to be spreading. The best historians assiduously avoid ascribing “good guy/bad guy” status to our ancestors for a very good reason: we were all bastards at one point or another.

Contact lens computers?

On a brighter note, there could come a day where we ditch our phones and scroll the internet via contact lenses (via Tech Crunch):

With a focus on new materials and moving away from silicon-based processing and towards new approaches to using optoelectronics, Xpanceo’s modest ambition, Axelrod said in an interview, is to “merge all the gadgets into one, to provide humanity with a gadget with an infinite screen. What we aim for is to create the next generation of computing.”

….the company has developed an AI platform to help develop its frameworks. It describes “neural interfacing” as the technique it will use to give wearers of its lenses full control over applications without them needing to use “awkward” eye movements or extra controllers. (Some prototypes of other smart or connected lenses involve users lowering eyelids to change functions, for example.)

Initially, its prototypes cover three categories of usage. These are a lens that allows for night vision and 3D; a lens that offers measurement and precision vision (for example for clinical use); and a holographic lens for augmented reality experiences. Xpanceo’s plan is to use the funding to work on merging these functionalities into one lens, which it estimates will be completed by 2025 or 2026.

Neural interfacing, for those not familiar with the term, is a “a direct, electrical bridge between analogue nervous systems and digital man-made systems.” Prototypes look something like this:

Xpanceo would obviously have to make their interfacing system a lot more wearable than this, but if they can allow people to access the internet via a contact lens, then I’m sure it’s possible.

See you next week!

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