I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
This clarifies things, thank you. I've gotten the impression that Masad doesn't have a very coherent worldview so I doubt he has given this contradiction much thought.
Both sides of...what? I'm confused. Is the idea "all these people have a lot more money than I think they'll ever need and it makes me mad"? Me too. Just don't see how it's relevant.
The idea is that as money gets so concentrated, so does real political power. And with that concentration of political power comes extreme disregard for the opinions of the masses. I think it's a fair argument that the world has always catered to the will of rich people, but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich, and so much wealth is concentrated in so few.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
> “There was an aspect of, like, ‘Fuck the system,’” Masad said. “‘We need to remake civilization.’”
No matter what the political views, running into "real" money radicalizes most people and gives them the impression that they reached a superior evolutionary stage that uniquely entitles them... no, demands from them that they bend society and human civilization to their will, reshape it in their image, make it better because they are better. A sort of messianic complex.
This is the famous horseshoe paradox that says extremes are closer to each other than to the center. They might look completely different in their views but in reality they're back to back in the same place. 2 sides of the same coin. Different imprint, same value.
> but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich...
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
> How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
The podcast The Empire Never Ended has recently finished a rather good series on Meir Kahane, one of the most important influences on contemporary zionism:
It's like defining Germany as "a state that genocided various groups", or defining Irish nationalism as "a movement characterized by terrorist attacks against British civilians". Whether or not those claims are accurate, they're not defining features of the things we're trying to define.
And sure, most Zionists are not Jews because the Jewish population is too tiny to be a majority in almost any political category. Similarly most people who support Somaliland independence are not Somalilanders, but probably Indians or Chinese or something.
The zionist movement has never been peaceful, it has always aimed for violent expulsion of native populations from Palestine. One might argue that socialist or liberal zionism is not overtly jewish supremacist, but in practice they always were so I'd contest that. Unlike the irish they also did not have a reason to exterminate the palestinians specifically, whereas the irish have good reason to resist british influence.
So you agree that zionism is a movement mainly consisting of christians, you're just not aware that both christian and jewish zionists prefer to paint the movement as a jewish underdog and distract from things like the nukes and nuke carrying backers and the genocide and so on.
They have been reluctant to give up their homeland, you mean. Yes, resistance to occupation and genocide is usually to some extent violent, because the occupier is extremely violent to begin with.
They never actually had sovereign control over the land. It was controlled by Romans and then by the Turks and then by the British and when the British left it was basically up for grabs.
Sharing the land with european colonists that used terrorism and ethnic cleansing to remove and to a lesser extent subjugate the native population? Why would they?
If you're suggesting that a peoples' right to live in their homeland is forfeited as a result of immigration, terrorism or ethnic cleansing, that would be bad news for Palestinians. Gaza and WB Area A are Jew-free zones, and there were around 30k rocket attacks from Gaza alone.
Quite the opposite, I'm suggesting the palestinians still have a right to their homelands even though europeans have settled, terrorised and displaced them.
Yeah, what about "rocket attacks"? Are they somehow more devastating than the US-israeli armory? If someone spits in front of my feet, then I can have them watch while I beat their family to death?
It is really despicable the way people like you completely dismiss Hamas atrocities like what they did on Oct 7 2023 when 1,219 people were killed by the attacks: at least 810 civilians (including 38 children and 71 foreign nationals) and at least 379 members of the security forces. 364 civilians were killed while they were attending the Nova music festival and many more wounded. Israel exists and the Palestinians will never be able to defeat it and they are very stupid for trying and failing for 76 years.
Hamas's official position, expressed in its original 1988 charter and repeatedly affirmed by many of its leaders' statements and actions (including the October 7, 2023 attack), is to
destroy the state of Israel and establish an Islamic state in its place "from the river to the sea". The 1988 charter explicitly called for the killing of Jews as a religious duty.
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We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/national/etc. battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which side of which battle you are or aren't on.
