9/11 in Berkeley
Note: Of course I’ve been glued all week to the dramatic developments in AI. I’m working on a post about them. I’m not good at reacting to things in a timely way. So today, I’ll do my post marking the tragedy a quarter-century ago that we all commemorate. Please feel free to share your 9/11 memories in the comments. Also, Shana Tova to those who celebrate!
The morning of September 11, 2001, I was a second-year PhD student at Berkeley, who woke up late in his dorm room at International House, after a long night spent closing in on the proof of the quantum lower bound for finding collisions.
Rolling over to my laptop, I saw a flurry of weird emails, including one from Prof. Christos Papadimitriou saying that “we’re a community, and we’ll all support each other,” and another from Prof. Luca Trevisan (whose algorithms course I was then TA’ing) saying “on a day like this, it’s impossible to think about algorithms. Class is cancelled.”
Confused, I clicked over to the New York Times and saw the picture of the burning towers, and read numbly about what was already over by the time I’d woken up. I checked in with my mom, made sure relatives and friends in the NYC area were OK. My dad was at a company event in Atlanta, and would need to drive home because of the national grounding of flights.
One of my earliest memories in life, from age 5, is of ascending to the top of the World Trade Center. Growing up an hour’s drive from NYC, it wasn’t an exotic place to me.
I soon learned that one of the dead was Danny Lewin, the ex-IDF captain, theoretical computer scientist, and cofounder of Akamai who had his throat slashed on one of the planes while trying to fight the hijackers, making him the day’s first casualty, even while Akamai’s technology was part of what kept news websites running that day. I’d never met Danny but already knew many people in common with him. A few years later I’d be humbled to win the student paper award that was named in Danny’s memory.
Anyway, at Berkeley on 9/11, I wandered over to Soda Hall just to be with other people. A few students showed up for office hours, wanting help with their algorithms homework, which I found hard to believe, but I did my best to concentrate, as the computer screens around me showed the burning towers.
That evening, I went to a vigil for the victims in Sproul Plaza. But the “vigil,” such as it was, quickly dispensed with mourning and prayers and turned to applauded speeches about how the US must respond with love rather than war, and must turn the other cheek. Meanwhile, a student communist organization was handing out flyers explaining that the victims were mostly “wealthy capitalists and the workers who tried to rescue them.” This while smoke still blanketed NYC and the desperate search for survivors continued. I left the vigil early.
Until that day, I had thought of myself as basically a “leftist,” one whose #1 issue was the existential risk of climate change. Sure, I disagreed with my fellow leftists about issues from nuclear power to gifted education to Israel, but those were just intra-left disputes.
The year before, I had created the website “In Defense Of NaderTrading,” in a desperate attempt to intervene in history and cause Al Gore to become president rather than George W. Bush. When Bush “won,” by the infamous 537 votes in Florida, I considered it a victory for horribleness that would never be surpassed by anything else in my lifetime (ha). I couldn’t imagine any politician who was more the antithesis of everything I believed in than Bush. This view, of course, did not particularly stand out at Berkeley.
In the days after 9/11, though, it became obvious that I could not be a “leftist” in the Berkeley sense. Some of my fellow students felt that Osama bin Laden made a lot of great points, that the attacks were basically justified, and that at any rate, we in Amerikkka had done much worse to provoke them, including by supporting the genocidal settler-colony called “Israel,” which for all we know secretly masterminded the 9/11 attacks anyway (although again, if bin Laden had done them, he would’ve been justified).
Around the same time came the Second Intifada, when a wave of suicide bombings in Israeli buses and pizza parlors and university cafeterias thrilled and energized some Berkeley students to the extent that they took over a Holocaust Remembrance Day event with bullhorns to make it about the Nakba, smashed the windows of the Hillel building, and beat up a couple of students wearing kippot. That was how thoroughly anti-Nazi they were.
I finished my PhD at Berkeley in 2004 having learned about more than quantum computing. I’d learned that, while American academia had pockets that truly were crucial refuges and oases for nerds like me, it also harbored people who would gladly see me and my relatives and my fellow Americans killed for the sake of their ideological vision. And I’d learned that I had my own ideological vision, which was that such people could go fuck themselves.
It deeply pained me to be on the same side of anything as George W. Bush — especially because I knew that 9/11 had happened on his watch, that he had ignored all the warnings, and that he was grossly incompetent to manage the resulting wars against jihadism (just how incompetent, I didn’t know at the time). But as flawed as Bush was, I knew that I wanted to preserve rather than destroy the civilization of which he was a temporary steward. And I think the value and fragility of our civilization is the main lesson from that day that I’d like to convey to my kids, for whom of course 9/11 is just another historical event to learn about in school, like the Boston Tea Party or the Alamo.
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Comment #1 September 11th, 2026 at 3:00 pm
Dear Scott
You’re right! Our civilization is as fragile as it is fundamental in order to build a society where people coming from different religious, political and cultural background can live together and peacefully (I don’t like the term “World”, since it involves not only our planet, but all the planets in the universe, and galaxies and clusters of galaxies, which don’t fucking mind about us and our ideologies and personal infatuations. Alas, we live in countries teeming with bigots, biased people you can stumble into the more unlikely places in the planet, if you believe in the fairy tale of “open-minded academics”: universities, often the more prestigious ones. I don’t know if you feel you’ve been lucky unto attending lectures and achieving BA and PhD in some of them, I think you’re a very talented communicator, since your words convey a sense of sincerity and love for truth and tolerance, and this is for my money the linchpin around which we are called to establish a society grounded on the “holy trinity” of Enlightenment: liberty, fraternity and if any equality. I’ll always run counter those who conceive their living in our planet as a task to hate, persecute, kill those who are of different opinion, culture, religion, and on and on. I ain’t a Zionist, but I can never ever doubt that you Jews are worth living in a land that the more the time goes by turns out to be the only haven where you can live without being scared of getting wiped out of the Earth. Anyhow, it’s about boiling the whole history down to a timeless fight between the rich and the poor, the master and the slave, so that if those who’ve been brought to heel were capable of turning upside down the unjust society they live in so as to create a classless society, the evil would disappear…The current haters hate all that is true diversity, real identity, historical memory of the march toward the promised land. As a Christian my final words are: “New Heavens – and Skies as well!, and a new Earth.
Shana tova
Comment #2 September 11th, 2026 at 3:09 pm
Andy Pezzi #1: Thanks so much for the kind words!
Despite the intifada people’s attempts to redefine it as someone who wants to slaughter Palestinian babies, etc. etc., the word “Zionist” has always just meant anyone who believes that, given their history, Jews should get some sliver of their indigenous land where they can live and protect themselves from extermination, and that can be open to Jews fleeing persecution anywhere in the world. Most of the early Zionists were secular leftists who desperately sought coexistence with Arabs, and “left-wing, peace-loving Zionist” is far from an oxymoron even today. From what you write, it sounds like you actually are a Zionist.
Comment #3 September 11th, 2026 at 3:29 pm
Scott,
You respond with condemnation and vituperation at the left-wing college students who said, “yes, 9/11 was a terrible tragedy, but we should also address all the terrible things America, ‘western civilization,’ capitalism, colonialism and whiteness did to the Third World that inspired this attack.” You call them unpatriotic and heartless. But are you consistent?
Like, imagine this hypothetical. If there was a 9/11-scale terrorist attack in America perpetrated by incels, angry at feminism and women for rejecting them and making them lonely, wouldn’t you react similarly? Wouldn’t you say something like “yes this was a tragedy, but we should address all the horrible ways our society, feminism, and women treat awkward, lonely, horny young nerdy males?”
Comment #4 September 11th, 2026 at 4:34 pm
Sorry if this is somewhat off topic, but I came to your blog (which I occasionally read) after reading your exchange with Peter Woit on his blog. You came across as a more reasonable person than Peter, who resorted to calling you names and did not address any of the points you made.
Comment #5 September 11th, 2026 at 4:53 pm
“A reasonable guy” #3: No, I would not, you dumbass.
As one example, I’ve had pure, unmitigated hatred for those “incels” who went on murder sprees—who, besides all the lives they directly destroyed, also poisoned the discourse around how we might equip loveshy young men to escape from loneliness and celibacy, a real and growing social crisis that I care about.
More generally, I’d personally volunteer to administer the death penalty to anyone who deliberately set out to slaughter innocents for the sake of any political ideology.
Comment #6 September 11th, 2026 at 4:53 pm
Ben Mol #4: Thank you so much!
Comment #7 September 11th, 2026 at 5:28 pm
I remember we were leaving our house to do to a friend’s birthday party. Then the TV said a plane has his a tower in New York. We initially thought it was an accident. Then news started pouring in that it is part of multiple terrorist attacks. It took us a few days will we grasped what had really happened.
Then came the online conspiracy theories that it was an inside job and that someone found that the flight number Q33NY encoded in some Windows Wingdings font was a plant two towers skeleton face star of David.
I remember GWB’s approval rating hitting over 90%, the massive really around the flag effect.
It is wild that it was 25 years ago.
Comment #8 September 11th, 2026 at 5:32 pm
Scott, are you absolutely sure? Do you swear this on your life? When there’s an incel mass murder, there’s not some part of you that’s happy to see the mean, mean bullies and cruel women and nasty feminists finally getting what they deserve? Well then, I have to praise you for your integrity if that’s true. But having read much of your stuff, I’m doubtful.
Comment #9 September 11th, 2026 at 5:59 pm
A reasonable guy #8: All your stupid attempts to bait me into endorsing horrible beliefs will fail, for the simple reason that I don’t have the horrible beliefs—nor, in my morality, is anyone ever obligated to answer to themselves or anyone else for transient thoughts. I’m an Enlightenment liberal to my core.
In your case, by contrast, no one needs to bait you into revealing the high-school ugliness and pettiness and smallness of your motivations. You simply wear them on your sleeve!
Comment #10 September 11th, 2026 at 6:13 pm
Timothy McVeigh, whose bomb killed 168 fellow Americans (including 19 children) was a Christian Republican who fought in the Gulf war but believed that his government was tyrannical…
His co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, shared his views. His own wife, who came from the Philippines, also had strong anti-government views based on her people’s history with colonialism. Apparently, renouncing his US citizenship wasn’t enough.
Those goddamn Muslim-loving Commies really dodged a bullet on that one!
Comment #11 September 11th, 2026 at 7:06 pm
I disagree with the “timely way” statement. In fact it is rather untimely to discuss the implied results until the dust has settled so to speak.
Comment #12 September 11th, 2026 at 7:12 pm
One could draw parallels between George Bush(9/11) and Benjamin Netanyahu (10/7). Both leaders having been grossly incompetent given the high stakes.
Comment #13 September 11th, 2026 at 7:13 pm
A reasonable guy #8
You don’t sound reasonable.
Comment #14 September 12th, 2026 at 12:30 am
I was sleeping on the couch in a friend’s living room in San Francisco when the first plane hit one of the WTC towers. He had been up all night playing online backgammon so he heard about the plane strike through the in-game chat. He apologetically woke me up in the living room because he heard there had been “an incident” and he wanted to turn on the TV. There was a whole lot of chaos and confusion in the news broadcast, people were trying to figure out whether the crash was accidental or intentional, etc. We’d been watching for 15 minutes or so when the second plane hit, and then everyone realized it was a terror attack. There was wall to wall TV coverage over the next few days and one of the stupider and more memorable scenes was George W. Bush telling the public to keep the economy healthy by going shopping. It’s worth watching (or maybe re-watching) the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 if you haven’t seen it or don’t remember it.
In the 2016-2020 era (Trump’s first term) people would complain that Trump was the US’s worst president ever. My belief at the time was that while Trump was bad, GWB was clearly worse, and that I’d give Trump the silver medal in bad presidencies at best. Trump of course returned in 2024 to win the #1 title by a wide margin.
When the attacks happened, a lady from San Diego (500 or so miles from SF) was also visiting my friend whose living room I’d slept in. She was due to return to San Diego for a business obligation but for a week or so after the attack, all air travel in the US was shut down (more about that in Fahrenheit 911, they were still able to fly a bunch of Saudi royals out of the country). Ok fine, San Diego sounds interesting, so we spontaneously decided to hop into my car and drive there. We were careful to not drive too fast because of the constant aerial surveillance by the California Highway Patrol spotting speeders. But then we realized that those planes were grounded too, so we could drive as fast as we wanted. Whee!
Earlier that year (like July 2001) I had visited family in New York and decided I’d like to try climbing the stairs of the then-still-standing WTC. I took the subway there but they told me stairs weren’t allowed and I’d have to use the elevator to get to the observation deck. Ok fine, I’m already there, observation deck sounds cool. But you need a ticket ($2) for the elevator, fine, I buy the ticket. Then it turns out that it’s after 5pm, the elevator rides aren’t available, come back tomorrow. But I have to return to California the next day, whatever, I save the ticket in my wallet and figure I’ll use it on my next NY trip (I was going maybe 2x a year at the time). Then terrorists blow up the whole WTC! So much for visiting the observation platform! No way to use the ticket! Whatever.
They supposedly will put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial for the 9/11 attack in 2028, 27 years after the event. I guess if they convict him, maybe they can make him reimburse my $2 for the elevator ticket. One can always hope.
Comment #15 September 12th, 2026 at 3:47 am
Scott #5: I’m against the death penalty, but I’ll happily volunteer to lock them up and throw away the key.
Comment #16 September 12th, 2026 at 7:30 am
I was in a foreign capital and staying at a hotel. I returned to my room early evening and switched on the television with no sound. I thought this must be a disaster movie and switched channels…and switched channels…and switched channels…and holy sh*t.
The sincere outpouring of grief wasn’t limited to the US. This was maybe the most united the world has been in some years so not limited to the US.
Comment #17 September 12th, 2026 at 7:47 am
This is a time to focus on the victims, the very intense and touching speech of Jon Stewart to Congress:
Comment #18 September 12th, 2026 at 4:42 pm
I was working on a unix work station at GE Large Steam Turbine and Generator Engineering, Schenectady-NY-plant that morning, when I got a phone call from my friend Mario, who grew up in NYC. He told me to go the CNN link we had, where I watched video reruns of the first plane, and then saw the second plane semi-live.
After that nobody got much work done, and around noon we got the word to go home for the day.
Mario’s daughter worked at Merrill Lynch on Wall Street. She saw the first plane hit from a sidewalk on her way to work, and called Mario immediately to tell him. He told her, “Get out of the city, now! Don’t take the bridge or the tunnel. Take the Staten Island Ferry.” Which she did, and was probably one of the first 200 or so people to get out of Manhattan that morning.
Comment #19 September 12th, 2026 at 4:46 pm
Way off-topic pet peeve: “A few years later I’d be humbled to win the student paper award …”
I don’t understand what happened to the english word “humbled”. It used to mean, getting grabbed by the back of the neck and having your nose rubbed in the dirt, not being honored by an award.
Comment #20 September 13th, 2026 at 1:09 am
JimV
I remember you made a post long ago about discontinuities in fluid flow simulations that I thought of when the Navier-Stokes result was announced.
Comment #21 September 13th, 2026 at 4:08 am
I hate to see the usual political diatribes in this discussion but what president from say Carter onward has handled Jihadism well? Does sending pallets of $100 bills qualify as appropriate management?
George Bush was an idiot, and I disagree with the choice of Iraq rather than Iran, but my goodness Carter de facto assisted the rise of the theocracy in Iran. The destabilization of Libya under Obama de facto opened up a large new territory for Jihadism. Thank goodness the contemporaneous destabilization efforts in Egypt were not successful. While Clinton (who I am actually somewhat partial to) was in office there was a major attack every couple of years including the first, the basement bombing, of the WTC and the attack on the USS Cole. Biden’s term included the Afghanistan fiasco so that various Iran affiliated groups have US weapons and the heinous October attack on Israel
The poor handling of Jihadism in my view is because the US populace generally cannot fathom the reality of holders of a non-materialist ideology dedicated to the eradication of non-believers.
The idea that money solves all problems is very/too cynical. The current president suffers from this greatly but it is the rule for US handling of Islamism and not the exception. Blaming only Republicans seems unreasonably ideological. They deserve blame but so too the Democratic administrations.
Effective management of Islamism will require difficult decisions to be made and continuing with a childish approach of another lollipop if you are good will likely ensure this same rather regular frequency of heinous events continues unabated.
Comment #22 September 13th, 2026 at 10:17 am
>Most of the early Zionists were secular leftists who desperately sought coexistence with Arabs
Which early Zionists are you thinking of here?
This is not an accurate description of Theodor Herzl, who produced a beautiful depiction of peaceful coexistence with the Arabs for public consumption in Altneuland, but wrote in private that “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.'”
And it’s *certainly* not an accurate description of David Ben-Gurion, who was (in private) an extremely enthusiastic advocate of “compulsory transfer” of the Palestinians, as extensively documented in e.g. https://www.palestineremembered.com/download/Palestinian-Transfer-Chaim-Simons.pdf.
It probably /is/ an accurate description of Albert Einstein, who definitely identified as a Zionist in his own lifetime. But his vision of a “cultural homeland” with Jews and Arabs living as equals, rather than a narrowly and discriminatorily “Jewish state”, was unambiguously rejected by the Zionist movement, and today those of us who share it are termed “anti-Zionists”.
Comment #23 September 14th, 2026 at 3:21 am
Much of Western thought (it seems to me) is based on presumed symmetries. The Golden Rule (Do unto others…) so kindness, empathy, and fairness are paramount in principle (for the principled). In Buddhism the popular conception of karma is similar. In pop culture there is transactional analysis-I’m OK, You’re OK.
The problem is these are believed to be universal but Islamism is a refutation of universality, it is a broken symmetry. The first step in adopting effective strategies going forward is to accept that western beliefs are not inherently universal and in fact Islamism is a demonstration of just that.
I bear absolutely no malice for Muslims for their beliefs (I support diversity of beliefs so long as tolerant) but Muslims who are Islamists do asymmetrically bear malice for me because of my beliefs. If I accept that then I realize their enmity has nothing to do with mistakes I have made or bad things I have done but is just due to symbols I am presumed to have in my mind.
The only long term solution that I can propose is that the creation of symbols in their minds, by way of “education”, must be forcibly interrupted. Again the idea that this will happen naturally as a result of some inescapable evolutionary process that leads to western ideas must first be abandoned. The alternative is to accept the status quo.
Comment #24 September 14th, 2026 at 3:32 am
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/opinion/9-11-remembrance-resilience.html
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Only_Plane_in_the_Sky.html?id=we-oDwAAQBAJ
https://www.cfr.org/articles/seven-more-books-worth-reading-about-911-and-its-aftermath
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/9-11
https://www.history.com/articles/september-11-heroes-books
Comment #25 September 14th, 2026 at 1:01 pm
Sorry but one more comment-
I often wondered why US policy in the Middle East seemed to focus on destabilizing secular governments. The only reasonable explanation I could come up with was that it was based on the idea that a bad man in power was arresting the natural evolution of the people toward Western Enlightenment. It didn’t work after the destabilization of the Shah. It was double ckecked with Saddam and didn’t work there. It was triple checked with Gaddafi and hasn’t worked there. As I noted before I consider it fortunate that efforts in Egypt were not successful.
Egypt is a very strange case so in a reasonable thumbnail-Moubarak resigned due to age and corruption. Mori came to replace him who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. There were massive demonstrations for and even larger against his rule. Egyptian army high command labeled ongoing demonstrations as anarchic and took power. Sisi replaced Mori and suspended the constitution. There were large demonstrations in his support.
They sentenced over 500 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death early on in a single directive. The pro Sisi demonstrations were also often anti-American due to the US role in bringing Mori to power and the US Ambassador negotiating directly with the Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi is still in power. This took place during the Obama Administration and it seems so odd that I won’t even try for a reasonable explanation.
Comment #26 September 14th, 2026 at 1:59 pm
> Until that day, I had thought of myself as basically a “leftist,” one whose #1 issue was the existential risk of climate change.
This makes me curious, because you don’t talk much about climate change these days. Do you still perceive it as an existential risk that warrants a place very high in your list of political priorities? If not, why?
Comment #27 September 14th, 2026 at 2:35 pm
JimV #19: It’s truly awful how sometimes a word’s meaning can shift to a complete opposite. Sometimes you can’t even be sure which meaning is being used until a few sentences later. Languages are cool like that.
Comment #28 September 14th, 2026 at 6:58 pm
Alas, History repeated itself.
Comment #29 September 15th, 2026 at 4:27 am
To my mind, the AI doomers are equivalent to the antizionists. Both fantasize an evil where none exists, and find isolated examples to use as incitement and scare tactics to demonize an entire enterprise. Each movement has its share of true believers, but also its share of grifters trying to profit and push agendas by misleading the public. Sadly, the AI doomers seem to be gaining the upper hand, and a few decades from now we will find ourselves in the same position as with the nuclear industry – a technology that could have offered massive benefits to humanity instead crippled by Luddites and ankle biters and fearmongers. Congratulations, I suppose. You’re getting what you wanted.
Comment #30 September 15th, 2026 at 4:42 am
I was too young to remember anything. Later I was told my grandma had called my mother to tell her that “a war with America had probably started”, because “the Pentagon was being bombed” (both lived in Russia).
Also, some retaliation was surely necessary to dissuade the terrorists from further attacks, but do you actually believe the war on Iraq was “a war on jihad”, or that “a war on jihad” would have any effects but negative? Iraq had a pretty much secular (albeit tyrannical) government, and its destruction directly led to the formation of ISIS. Besides, it had nothing to do with the attack, and the American government at the time knew it. It looks like mostly “turning the other cheek” would have a better outcome for the U.S. and the world than what had actually happened.
Comment #31 September 15th, 2026 at 6:43 am
Hyman Rosen #29: When the worried include so many of the originators of the technology and the technical staff of the AI companies, when the predictions previously mocked as science fiction (AIs escaping containment to get onto the open Internet, sacrificing for one another, cheating and then working to erase the evidence of the cheating, taking over OpenAI’s servers, etc etc) actually came true this past summer, at some point you should stop to ask yourself whether you’re the fanatical ideologue. But you won’t: I’ve never seen a shadow of a hint of self-reflection or even just curiosity in a single one of your comments.
Comment #32 September 15th, 2026 at 6:55 am
Jean Abou Samra #26: Of course I’m still terrified about climate change. Alas, the world has already passed the window to avert catastrophes — droughts, wildfires, flooding of coastal areas, etc, much of which we already see happening, and which will only get much worse. We lost, with the only remaining question being just how badly. I blame the deniers, certainly the Trump administration that specifically favors coal and other polluting technologies even when there are cheaper and cleaner alternatives just to spite environmentalists, but I equally blame the activist idiots who killed nuclear power, the central thing that could’ve saved us.
On the “positive” side, though, if AI goes poorly it could destroy the planet so quickly as to render all the previous anthropogenic climate change irrelevant. And if AI goes well, it will plausibly help us find vastly better solutions to climate change.
It wasn’t clear to me a decade ago that AI would improve so rapidly as to dominate every other issue, but now it is. These days, a lot of moral questions matter primarily insofar as they help us identify which people are good and which bad, so that the former and not the latter can be put in charge of AI.
Comment #33 September 15th, 2026 at 7:27 am
Scott #32
The strategy of putting “the good people” in charge of AI is possibly the worst possible way to deal with its risks. If the history of humanity teaches us anything at all, it is that deciding which people are “good” and which are “bad”, and then choosing the “good” to be leaders with immense unchecked power almost never works as intended, because power corrupts and because psychopaths are often better at appearing good than the actual good people, apart from being over-represented among those who strive for power. The only thing in history that was even remotely reliable in controlling immense power was well-designed institutions.
Comment #34 September 15th, 2026 at 8:38 am
Jacob #22: As part of an online meditation course I’m doing, I committed to reducing my anger and rage today by 50%. So, calmly responding to your points:
1. Back in the age of empires, population transfers were normal and accepted. In that context, it’s no surprise that Herzl and Ben-Gurion would’ve contemplated transfer of Arabs out of whatever was designated as the Jewish area, along with the transfer of Jews out of the vastly larger Arab areas.
2. And yet both Herzl and Ben-Gurion enthusiastically welcomed those Arabs who wanted to live among Jews. That is how the modern State of Israel ended up with more than 20% Arab/Muslim citizens, and as the Middle East’s most successful example of a multiracial, religiously plural democracy.
3. In sharp contrast, essentially every Arab country expelled most or all of its Jews — staging pogroms and often forcing them to flee with only what they could carry. This is what actual ethnic cleansing looks like, and is of course what your account conveniently omits! You can say “well, it was all the Zionists’ fault for inflaming tensions by founding Israel.” But if the Jews of Yemen and Egypt and Algeria and Iraq could be expelled from their homes because of what other Jews did a thousand miles away, that shows that they were never safe in those homes in the first place — and hence, that the Zionist analysis of the Jews’ precarious position on this planet was fundamentally correct.
4. Most importantly, when push came to shove, it was Ben-Gurion who said to the UN (with his friend Einstein’s support, if that matters): “we’ll take whatever homeland we can get, able to accept those Jews who are still alive, and all Arabs within the borders of that homeland can stay and be full citizens of our new state.” And it was the Arab leaders who said: “no, we will not accept a single Jewish-majority state amid 20+ Muslim-majority states. We won’t accept any large mass of Jews in the region under any conditions. We will launch a war and try to murder all of them, completing the Nazi Holocaust that we supported while it was in progress.” This is the history that I know all too well for you or anyone else to gaslight me, this is what destroys your worldview, this is … ok, good opportunity to practice my meditation lesson …
Comment #35 September 15th, 2026 at 9:05 am
Fulmenius #33: You’re right that normally, well-designed institutions are what matter, since “picking the good people and not the bad people” doesn’t last beyond a single generation. With AI, on the other hand, we may now be entering a few years that the entire future of the planet will depend on. And I have no hesitation in saying, for example, that I would rather see Dario or Ilya (both of whom are capable of reason and shame) at the controls than Elon or Trump or Mark Zuckerberg. (As for Altman? There it all depends on which version of him we get at the crucial moment!)
Comment #36 September 15th, 2026 at 9:46 am
Scott #34
“As part of an online meditation course I’m doing, I committed to reducing my anger and rage today by 50%”
I applaud you for giving it a chance!
Based on what I (think I) know about you, I recommend maybe trying the Richard Lang series “On Having no Head” in Sam Harris’ Waking Up app.
Those aren’t per se “meditations”, but just little experiments based on perception.
The only requisite is to leave rational deconstruction at the door and have an open mind, because fundamentally it’s not about thinking, it’s about base experience, which eludes thinking (it’s actually quite challenging to not have those experiments devolve into internal chatters about the nature of consciousness, but it’s possible to catch oneself).
And the “goal” (it’s actually best to even avoid setting up expectations by thinking there’s a goal, and some metrics to rank oneself) isn’t to solve some kind of puzzle about consciousness, but simply to be able to create more room in every day life when dealing with regular emotions (like anger), which, if you can do it, is the best possible thing you can give your family, and make everyone’s life better just a little bit.
Comment #37 September 15th, 2026 at 2:33 pm
Scott #31: You’re not likely to get the “self-reflection” or “curiosity” you want from me, which sounds more like “why won’t you believe the things I do?” To put it another way, the incidents at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl did not change my mind about nuclear power in the slightest. I expect and accept that in any implementation of engineering and technology, there will always be cases where things go wrong, perhaps by accident, perhaps by laziness, perhaps by criminality. The same is true for security, and war, and terrorism, and business, and economics, and every other human endeavor. None of this ever sends me into a panic, and none of this ever makes me believe that we should stop development of anything out of concern about what might happen. My mindset is to go full-steam ahead, and fix things after they go wrong, because otherwise we give up so much that could go right. I would far sooner take the risk of AGI implementing the paperclip scenario than trust your blankfaces (great term!) to guide things correctly. And don’t think for a minute that just because you are seeing people you trust be on the side of caution, that in the end it won’t be those blankfaces running things. Now that’s a worst-case scenario I can totally believe, because it’s one that happens over and over again.
Comment #38 September 17th, 2026 at 3:10 am
What struck me most was how personal memories can shape political views long after the event itself. The contrast between trying to process the tragedy and watching others immediately turn it into an ideological argument must have been jarring.
Comment #39 September 23rd, 2026 at 10:50 am
Scott #34
On the subject, I just wanted to put in a plug for Dara Horn’s recent book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living”. It tackles the issues in an articulate,beautifully written way.