Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
How Disabled People Get Exploited to Build the Technology of War (Liz Jackson, Rua Williams / The New Republic)
Recent headlines continue to illuminate the way this technology is seamlessly bypassing disabled people for the battlefield. Mirsky has joined a consortium of Israeli robotics companies and academic organizations that work together “to jointly develop human-robot interaction capabilities.” It was recently reported that one of the consortium start-ups, Robotican, is treating Gaza as a “testing ground for military robots.” It is unknown how Mirsky’s flagship “guide robot that will assist people with visual impairments” will accelerate militarized support for authoritarian oppression through technologies of surveillance and destruction. But her stated goal for researchers to investigate “among other things, how autonomous a robot can be, the extent to which it can make decisions and perform actions without human intervention,” reifies designers’ attitudes about the passive role to which disabled people are relegated in the development of experimental technologies
Israel Has a Choice to Make: Rafah or Riyadh (Thomas L. Friedman / New York Times)
But revenge is not a strategy. It is pure insanity that Israel is now more than six months into this war and the Israeli military leadership — and virtually the entire political class — has allowed Netanyahu to continue to pursue a “total victory” there, including probably soon plunging deep into Rafah, without any exit plan or Arab partner lined up to step in once the war ends. If Israel ends up with an indefinite occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, it would be a toxic military, economic and moral overstretch that would delight Israel’s most dangerous foe, Iran, and repel all its allies in the West and the Arab world.
Zionism is “a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value” (Naomi Klein)
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Image: Karolina Grabowska