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Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

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Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#351
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there could be, and Hertzel writes about it explicitly - the idea that Jews need a homeland because antisemitism makes it impossible for them to live within another people. In regard to religion itself, like the other post said, he couldn't really care less and even advocated for Jews to convert to Christianity at a time, seeing it as another solution to the discrimination they're facing: "I see myself as a…

Look, there's no way the coordinates this guy triangulated lined up with the religious site by chance. That would be similar to the odds that a flawed calculation of the age of the earth would turn out to be 6,000 years. If he had said anywhere else that argument might be right, but not of all places the temple mount, the one place in the world nobody would need any explanation for. If you're saying he was writing fr…

Of course it did not happen by coincidence, but Hertzel himself was considering other places too. There were real discussions around the best location, and finally it was agreed that Mandatory Palestine is the place most Jews would unite around - due to history, religion, culture, existing population etc.

My point is that the idea that Jews need a homeland was prior to the idea of the exact location it should take place in. If you bundle history, culture, belief and a like into the word "religion", then sure, we can say that the later decision of the exact location was based on religion. For us non-religious Jews that sounds awkward: we feel connected to the place because of our culture, not because of our non-existing religious feelings - but that's just semantics.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers" Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'? I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged. Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of la…

> Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'? You should be less flippant. The accused's name is Samuel Corner. He and his friends are still on trial for their actions. Here's the bodycam footage where you see Samuel Corner attack police seargent Kate Evans with a sledgehammer while she was on the ground, fracturing her spine. Watch from 3m05s to 3m10s: https://www.yo…

The quote from the article continues. You cut it off.

"It was me not really knowing what I was doing, I was trying to protect Leona, or Zoe. I couldn't tell who was screaming."

"My friends were in danger and they [the police] were getting quite hands-on.

"I remember just feeling like I had to help somehow. I would never think to do that to someone, I was just trying to help," he said.

I don't have any opinion on this but I think its important to have the full quote

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#354
post #282
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You mean the well-documented terrorist operations by Israel against Jews in the Arab disaspora? The terrorist state started with terrorism and sustained through it.

I actually think he is referring to these events, both happening before the establishment of Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_pogrom

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#355
post #341
post #266

The title is a non-sequitur. “Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.

It was kind of the focus of the article though - how his pro Palestinian politics interacted with being a SV founder. It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.

> It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff.

TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#356
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, there's no way the coordinates this guy triangulated lined up with the religious site by chance. That would be similar to the odds that a flawed calculation of the age of the earth would turn out to be 6,000 years. If he had said anywhere else that argument might be right, but not of all places the temple mount, the one place in the world nobody would need any explanation for. If you're saying he was writing fr…

Of course it did not happen by coincidence, but Hertzel himself was considering other places too. There were real discussions around the best location, and finally it was agreed that Mandatory Palestine is the place most Jews would unite around - due to history, religion, culture, existing population etc. My point is that the idea that Jews need a homeland was prior to the idea of the exact location it should take pl…

I guess we have just been talking semantics. I am only saying that the cultural view came from the religious view originally. I don't think that is something many people would disagree about.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers" Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'? I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged. Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of la…

> Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'? You should be less flippant. The accused's name is Samuel Corner. He and his friends are still on trial for their actions. Here's the bodycam footage where you see Samuel Corner attack police seargent Kate Evans with a sledgehammer while she was on the ground, fracturing her spine. Watch from 3m05s to 3m10s: https://www.yo…

It feels to me like there's a distinction between "on one occasion, one person in group X did Y" and "group X does Y", and it's the second of those that (for some choices of Y, including "attacking police with sledgehammers") could justify calling group X a terrorist group.

Obviously "on one occasion, a person in group X did Y" is evidence for "group X does Y". If Samuel Corner attacked a police sergeant with a sledgehammer during one Palestine Action, er, action, then that's the sort of thing we expect to see more often if PA is generally in favour of attacking police with sledgehammers. (Either as a matter of explicit open policy, or as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing where everyone in PA knows that if they start smashing up police as well as property then their PA comrades will think better of them rather than worse.)

But it falls way short of proof. Maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Palestine Action is a terrorist organization after all; but maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because Samuel Corner is a thug or an idiot or was drunk or whatever. Or maybe Samuel Corner sledgehammered a cop because the cops were already being violent with the Palestine Action folks and he was doing his (ill-advised) best to protect the others from the police. (This, as I understand it, is his account of things.)

(An Oxford University graduate attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer. I take it you would not say that that makes the University of Oxford a terrorist organization, and you wouldn't say that even if he'd done it while attending, say, a university social function rather than while smashing up alleged military hardware. It matters how typical the action is of the organization, what the group's leadership thinks of the action, etc.)

I took a look at the video. It's not easy to tell what's going on, but it looks to me as follows. One of the PA people is on the ground, being forcibly restrained and tasered by a police officer, complaining loudly about what the police officer is doing. (It isn't obvious to me whether or not her complaints are justified[1].) There is another police officer, whom I take to be Kate Evans, nearby, kneeling on the ground and helping to restrain this PA person. Samuel Corner approaches with his sledgehammer and attacks that second police officer. I can't tell from the video exactly what he's trying to do (e.g., whether he's being as violent as possible and hoping to kill or maim, or whether he's trying to get the police officer off the other person with minimal force but all he's got is a sledgehammer).

[1] I get the impression that she feels she has the right not to suffer any pain while being forcibly restrained by police, which seems like a rather naive view of things. But I also get the impression that the police were being pretty free with their tasering. But it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, and I imagine it was even harder in real time, and I am inclined to cut both her and the police some slack on those grounds.

It's highly misleading, even though not technically false, to say that Corner attacked Kate Evans "while she was on the ground"; she certainly was on the ground in the sense that she was supported by the floor, and even in the sense that she wasn't standing up -- I think she was crouching -- but it's not like she was lying on the ground injured or inactive; she was fighting one of the other PA people, and she was "on the ground" because that PA person was (in a stronger sense) "on the ground" too.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not approve of attacking police officers with sledgehammers just because they are restraining someone you would prefer them not to be restraining, even if you think they're doing it more violently than necessary. And I have a lot of sympathy with police officers not being super-gentle when the people they're dealing with are armed with sledgehammers.

But the story here looks to me more like "there were a bunch of PA people, who had sledgehammers because they were planning to smash up military hardware; the cops arrived and wrestled and tasered them, and one of the PA people lost his temper and went for one of the cops to try to defend his friend whom he thought was being mistreated, and unfortunately he was wielding a sledgehammer at the time" than like "PA is in the business of attacking cops with sledgehammers".

None of that makes Kate Evans any less injured. But I think those two possibilities say very different things about Palestine Action. Carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash equipment is different from carrying sledgehammers because you want to smash people. Attacking police because they are a symbol of the state is different from attacking police because they are attacking your friend. One person doing something bad in the heat of the moment because he thinks his friend is being mistreated is different from an organization setting out to do that bad thing.

There are plenty of documented cases of police being violent (sometimes with deadly effect) with members of the public. Sometimes they have good justification for it, sometimes not so much. Most of us don't on those grounds call the police a terrorist organization. Those who do say things along those lines do so because they think that actually the police are systematically violent and brutal.

I think the same applies to organizations like Palestine Action. So far as I can tell, they aren't systematically violent and brutal. Mostly they smash up hardware that they think would otherwise be used to oppress Palestinians. (I am making no judgement as to whether they're right about that, which is relevant to whether they're a Good Thing or a Bad Thing but not to whether they're terrorists.) Sometimes that leads to skirmishes with the police. On one occasion so far, one of them badly injured a police officer. It's very bad that that happened, but this all seems well short of what it would take to justify calling the organization a terrorist one.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#358
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Damn those racist Haredi Jews, right?

Don't get too excited about their views - they very much believe that the land belongs to Jews, they just think they should wait for the Messiah to give us the signal before going there.

It's funny how people associate their views with humanism: they are simply extremely religious and on this specific question, the current result of their extreme beliefs happen to align with yours.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a minimum the RAF has operated hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza. Multiple sources linked on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_Gaza_wa...

If I recall correctly this was in direct response to British citizens being kidnapped and held hostage inside Gaza. These were intelligence sorties with the express aim to help locate UK citizens.

Literally hilarious.

Re: Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent. That is just not what the word violent means (unless used figuratively but I don't think that's what you mean). It means hurting, or attempting to hurt, a person (or maybe an animal). Setting fire or blowing up a home which might have people still in it is certainly violent, but destroying property for the sake or property destruction is not. Of course, de…

There are a lot of definitions for violence, but most would include "destruction" along with "harm", "pain", "suffering" and so on. If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you? If my nation was at war with yours, and…

FWIW, if you did that to my house I'd be upset and angry and not much inclined to use the word "just" about it, but no, I wouldn't say you'd been violent to me.

(I would say you'd been violent to me if you'd slapped me in the face. I would rather be slapped in the face than have my house ransacked and smashed up. Some not-violent things are worse than some violent things.)

If you dropped a bomb on a weapons factory that had, or plausibly could have had, people in it then that would unquestionably be an act of violence. If you somehow knew that there was nothing there but hardware then I wouldn't call it an act of violence.

(In practice, I'm pretty sure that when you drop a bomb you scarcely ever know that you're not going to injure or kill anyone.)

I'm not claiming that this is the only way, or the only proper way, to use the word "violence". But, so far as I can tell from introspection, it is how I would use it.

There are contexts in which I would use the word "violence" to include destruction that only affects things and not people. But they'd be contexts that already make it clear that it's things and not people being affected. E.g., "We smashed up that misbehaving printer with great violence, and very satisfying it was too".

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