Free Republic

You may recall that Henry Kissinger was instrumental in brokering a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War which later lead to the Camp David Accord and lasting peace between Egypt and Israel, despite the U.S. supplying Israel with weapons and other support during the conflict. So maybe you might consider tempering your customary absolute declarations just a bit in the future.

Kissinger's work was decidedly more nuanced than your portrayal. He didn't want either side to win decisively, and tried to downplay the US's arming options to try and keep the Arab states from writing off the US entirely: When the war broke out, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to make sure that Israel did not lose, but they favored a low profile for the U.S. role, so as not to anger Arab countries that were already suspicious of U.S. policy. Moreover, Kissinger wanted to calibrate supply availabilities to influence Israeli war aims. The telcons from 13 October 1973 are especially revealing because they illustrate Kissinger’s suspicion that the Pentagon was “sabotaging” supply operations, which could risk putting “the whole goddamn strategy out of whack.” After Nixon decided in favor of a large-scale U.S. airlift of supplies, Kissinger told Leonard Garment that “we are going to wind up with the Arabs mad.”

This is also ignoring the greater dynamic of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's influence, as we apparently came close to nuclear confrontation because Israel tried to push for more than America wanted them to.

Given that a bunch of the other jurors had no issue going public with their frustrations about the holdout (to the point no one knew that the holdout was black until one of their interviews dropped it, days before Michael went public himself), I think the matter of legal filings was a fait accompli at that point.

This guy is running for something like the stamp collecting commission that no one cares about.

If Bo becomes Railroad Commisioner, he becomes the one responsible for regulating the oil and gas industry for the state of Texas.

So it's actually a very big deal.

He was born in West London, but his parents are from Trinidad.

He was a supporting character when Doctor Who relaunched back in 2005, and was part of the first few series for the Eccleston and Tennant eras.

I don’t think there were crowds of men lining up to support Chris Watts and chant “same, King; we feel ya!” Nor was there a GoFundMe for him.

I wager most men who heard about the story wanted him to hang.

That requires a warrant.

"Law enforcement offices that contract with Flock do not need a warrant to access travel information and can opt to share their data with local law enforcement offices, statewide or nationwide, creating a database of Americans’ real-time movements accessible to a range of police officers that spans much of the country."

You do not have an expectation of privacy when you are in a public place.

Why should 3rd parties who are not present at the moment of surveillance have any right to purchase Flock's surveillance data?

Why should a surveillance company be able to create a database of movement patterns that, if done by an individual, would be classified as stalking?

Law abiding have nothing to fear from Flock.

The fact this sentiment is being expressed on Free Republic (especially after everything that happened during the COVID lockdowns) is nauseating.

Listen to this man, and and understand that you are giving untold power to people who will find a way to make the "law abiding" no longer "law abiding": "One single emergency order, and all of a sudden, these cameras become a weapon of mass compliance of the people. A sledgehammer will ultimately sledgehammer."

At what point does it become indistinguishable from stalking?

Or just plain data harvesting?

The title of the article is pure clickbait, as "capitalism" isn't mentioned anywhere else in the article.

However, it is a good primer for Flock, how it got to where it is now, and the current backlash against it.

What do the tech companies get out of these flock cameras? How do they make money off of it?

That is entirely irrelevant to the overarching point of the thread: why are so many Americans opposed to New data centers to the degree that they are?

That is what I was addressing.

So Garrett’s response to the increasingly rights-depriving flock cameras is to just suck it up and accept that Big Brother has his eyes on you.

He's the CEO of Flock. He's the one pushing for the cameras.

It’s difficult to figure out what you’re even alleging.

Look at the thread title: "Who’s Behind Attacks on Data Centers?"

As AI has become more ubiquitous over the past few years, the loudest voices pushing for it have all been talking about how it would essentially replace humans, and that the job market would undergo seismic shifts that would displace huge chunks of the American workforce. Some of these voices were also the ones who had already dispossessed Americans of manifold jobs through foreign labor already, so it essentially comes off as 'We're coming to take MORE jobs.'

The demand for more data centers is quite explicitly (and publicly) driven by greater AI usage.

Flock is a surveillance platform (a proverbial living and breathing 4th Amendment violation) that relies on AI to help collate and sort through all of the data it collects. It is but one example of an AI-driven technology; it is just one that is currently in the news for rather notorious reasons, which is why I cited it.

The great undercurrent behind Americans' opposition to more data centers is rooted in the opposition to AI, because why wouldn't they, after being told by the people supporting AI that it was going to replace them? You'd have to be a "nut" to not expect there to be any blowback from Joe Q. Public!

To reiterate my point from the last post: "...through a confluence of factors that are not necessarily one and the same, the institutions driving for more data centers are largely the same ones behind the push for AI, and they have lost all trust with the average American. The leeway and good will they may have once had is no more."

To think that all American opposition is rooted in a Chinese psyop (as Kevin O'Leary seems to believe) is myopic.

I’ll write you off as a nut.

What reasons have modern tech firms given you to go to bat for them?

Why do you trust that their push for more data centers and for more AI is rooted in good intentions?

We would have no internet without data centers. So you should be against the internet, according to your non-sequitur.

lasereye, this is a rather silly straw man, given one aspect pointed out by Mariner already in reply #55.

Past data center construction is not equivalent to current proposed data center construction. (Notwithstanding that America, based on pretty much any available statistical survey, outpaces every other country in the world in terms of data center numbers. Anyone saying we have a data center gap with China is blowing smoke.)

For starters, the construction and proliferation of the Internet was accomplished via men of the United States and the West more generally (commercial ISPs first opened in the US and Australia; the DNS system was pioneered by the American Paul Mockapetris; etcetera). Now, many of those same IT firms are headed by foreigners, after their Western forebears—infected by the Leftist DEI zeitgeist—gave away the keys to the proverbial kingdom:

Given the rampant visa abuse already documented, the general downgrade in work quality (ask any IT guy who had to train their Indian replacement), and given the untold numbers of Americans who have been laid off in lieu of cheaper foreign labor, any reason to trust IT firms like this was already at historical lows.

Then, you have to consider how many of these same firms (or those who were their public face, or had a history with them, like Bill Gates), fell in HARD with the COVID lockdown hysteria, and often pushed for the most draconian measures they could.

These same firms pushing for AI have given reasons for Americans to distrust them: their willingness to dispossess Americans in favor of foreigners, and a willingness to push for the deprivation of Americans' Constitutional liberties and rights.

Now, all of a sudden, you have a data center push that's become more notorious (to the tune of nearly doubling the amount already present!) in light of the contentious AI boom. Where is the need for so much data storage coming from, that AI might have a hand in?

Enter Flock:

Amidst all of the abuses already documented regarding these Flock cameras, its CEO has said we need to..."compromise":

So Garrett—a home-grown American—is unfortunately of a time and mindset different from those Internet pioneers. Rather than focusing his ire on corrupt DAs and municipal governments (he's gone on the record as citing Atlanta's lawlessness as the reason for why he started Flock...Atlanta, the infamously Democrat city), he has instead decided that Americans should all accept to become part of a mass surveillance state.

And all of the data from these new Flock cameras has to go somewhere.

Which gets back to my overall point: through a confluence of factors that are not necessarily one and the same, the institutions driving for more data centers are largely the same ones behind the push for AI, and they have lost all trust with the average American. The leeway and good will they may have once had is no more.

And you don't need to be part of a Chinese bot farm to recognize that reality.

One of those things is not like the other.

Also, you don’t have to blame China for the blowback against data centers.

It’s easy enough to see that the Big Tech folks pushing hard for these data centers are the same ones who champion the replacement of labor by AI.

How did they think that people would react??

No it's hostile/non-hostile. The hostile parties are Russia and Islamists.

Neither Syria nor Turkey are in a state of war with Israel.

Syria allowed Turkey, whom they have an ongoing relationship with, to deploy troops at a Syrian military base. (Said air base, based on public reporting, is one that Turkey has been helping refurbish after it had been out of commission for years during the longstanding civil war.)

Israel, claiming that such a move violated a "status quo" (whatever legal force that has, as compared to an actual treaty with binding legal ramifications), launched ordnance at the air base in question.

By any objective measure, the "hostile" in this instance was Israel, as they struck first (whether or not Netanyahu claims it was a pre-emptive measure to deter further Turkish involvement with Syria...but by that metric, Turkey would be justified in attacking Israel because of the IDF's presence in Syrian territory).

Can you elaborate on why you think Putin was justified in invading Ukraine and why, apparently, you think Hezbollah are the good guys in that situation?

You don't have to support Putin or Russia to recognize that Israel's rationale for attacking Syria is fundamentally the same as Russia's rationale for invading Ukraine.

Any preference for one over the other thus comes down to the friend-enemy distinction: "It's fine for X to do it because they're my ally, but it's bad for Y to do it because they're not my ally."

Bookmarking for the governor’s election.

The question is, what’s the threshold for what’s “breaking news”?

I once posted a thread about an alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and one other nation (either Egypt, Pakistan, or Qatar), because it had just been announced that morning, and there were no other threads.

It got pulled out of Breaking News.