identity

A Genuine Actor: Francesco Serpico

There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”
It ain’t me you’re lookin for, babe.

Life without Limits: The Delusions of Technological Fundamentalism

In a routinely delusional world, what is the most dangerous delusion?
Living in the United States, I’m tempted to focus on the delusion that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of the world — a claim repeated robotically by politicians of both parties.
In a mass-consumption capitalist society, there’s the delusion that if we only buy more, newer, better products we all will be happier — a claim repeated endlessly in commercial propaganda (commonly known as advertising and marketing).

There is No Sheltered Rear: So Stand Up, Get Angry, and Don’t Take it Anymore!

Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man’s literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.

James Bowery - Can We Benefit From Artificial Intelligence?

James Bowery is an American IT pioneer. He is the architect of Sorotocracy.org, and the founder of FairChurch.org.
James returns to Red Ice for an enlightening discussion on artificial intelligence. First, we define artificial intelligence and review the current state of this fascinating field. We then explore a number of pertinent ideas, including confabulation and deep learning. This leads to a discussion on unsupervised learning, which James links to lossless compression. The show covers much more, including the problems with artificial intelligence.

Al-Araqeeb Village: Palestinian Bedouins Refuse to Surrender 116 Times

On August 1, the Palestinian Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb was destroyed for the 116th time. As soon as Israeli bulldozers finished their ugly deed and soldiers began evacuating the premises, the village resident immediately began rebuilding their homes.
Twenty-two families, or about 101 residents, are estimated to live here. By now, they are all familiar with the painful routine, considering the first round of destruction took place in July 2010.

The Untragic Mulatto

I remember, vividly, on a certain Martin Luther King Jr Day during my childhood—back before schools regularly observed the federal holiday—when my kindergarten teacher passed out coloring pages of Dr. King’s portrait which the class was to fill in. Not a minute after I began coloring brother Martin’s face the same color as my Afro-Filipino father—brown—I noticed all but two or three of my white classmates were coloring the page with black crayons.