zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — keeping a wary eye on algorithms, with the sting in the three links at the end ]
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Here’s a tweet alerting readers to a newspaper piece on the Munich terror attack:

Police investigate claim Muinch gunman lured victims to their deaths with fake Facebook posthttps://t.co/LQh0KYpjKF pic.twitter.com/oj82EoQdnq

— Evening Standard (@standardnews) July 23, 2016

Here, entirely by chance, is the tweet that followed it as I scrolled down my feed:

Reach your customers on a personal level with the right message, on the right platform, at the right time. https://t.co/TnaJVrqQng

— FoxMetrics (@FoxMetrics) July 17, 2016

That tweet, for what it’s worth, was promoted.

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I’m sure the people doing the promoting wouldn’t have chosen to have me read it immediately after reading the newspaper tweet just above it, but that’s the sort of things that happens when “thought” gets automated. It reminds me of the time I was researching al-Awlaki on the pro-jihadist site Revolution Muslim, and some algorithm suggested I’d like an add offering “bold Christian clothing”:

No sale there, I’m afraid.

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It gets more serious, though:

3 Quarks Daily, Algocracy: Outsourcing governance to Algorithms

WSJ, Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’ Showing Limits of Algorithms

ProPublica, How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm ProPublica

[ by Charles Cameron — i personally am better acquainted with “innocent until proven guilty”, but.. ]
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Contemplating this:

Nabokov's father was killed by assassins at a lecture and Vera made sure the same wouldn't happen to him pic.twitter.com/swSozOfGUA

— Gabe Habash (@gabehabash) May 20, 2016

in light of the Talmud:

“When someone comes to kill you, you must rise early and kill him first” -Babylonian Talmud: Berakoth 58
Judaism… http://t.co/PUGXcvPudK

— Conservatives (@ConservativAOLA) March 27, 2013

Obviously if Véra Nabokov intended to protect her husband, she intended to shoot his would-be assassin right before the assassination attempt, not right after it.

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If Someone Comes to Kill You, Rise Up and Kill Him First:

Several days before the horror of September 11, 2001, Israel’s Foreign Minister Shimon Peres spoke to Conservative rabbis in an international conference call. Responding to a concern expressed about Israel’s policy of preemptive targeted killings of suspected terrorist leaders and the inevitable collateral damage, Mr. Peres defended the practice, citing an oft-quoted rabbinic legal dictum, “Im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo,” “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him (first).” The uproar last July by Israel-bashers and, more credibly, by the Israeli Jewish public after the Israeli army bombed a Gaza apartment building, inadvertently killing fourteen civilians, including nine children, along with arch-terrorist Salah Shehada, again focused attention on the issue of collateral damage in the implementation of “Im ba l’hargekha.”

File under preemptive strikes, targeted killings, drones, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, etc.