The plantation was the original demonstration that total ownership and total incapacity coexist. If you think that history clue sounds a lot like today’s techbro fascination with AI, then this post is for you.

A new post called “Everything I own, owned” is worth a critical assessment of what drives the author and how it reflects the state of risk management in society.

First, reflect on how the slave plantation owner held absolute legal dominion over land, buildings, people. He could not plant, could not harvest, could not repair, could not cook his own food. Every practical competence lived in the people he kidnapped, raped and held hostage. Travelers’ accounts of the antebellum South repeatedly note decaying great houses, exhausted soil, deferred maintenance everywhere. Dominion without stewardship produces negligence and decay as its normal condition.

Second, reflect on the fear of the Plantation owner. The master feared his own property. Slave revolts, poisoning, arson. The entire apparatus of patrols and pass laws existed because ownership of what you cannot understand and did not build is a permanent state of anxiety. The plantation owner claims mastery, while having nothing to back it up.

When you read the “I own” post, you find a voice of someone who declares himself dominant over the monitor, refusing and denying its “popup” for self-care, yet afraid to touch it himself. He claims he is doing the reverse engineering work, while it really is a prompt for AI and he is entirely dependent on the machine that did it. The fear is structural, produced by the gap between what he insists he commands and what he actually comprehends.

Third, reflect upon the Plantation accounting system. It recorded the estate as the owner’s achievement. Bales produced, acres cleared, all credited to the man who directed. The “I own” post says the GitHub repos fill with “generated-slop docs” credited under his name, where the churn hours are tallied like labor extracted, the usual byline on a false mastery narrative. The system that erases the laborer from the output is what seems to be left intact 160 years after the Slaveholder Rebellion was lost. When you know history of 1800s American “management” practices, here we see only the laborer has changed.

The post’s actual argument, stripped of the framing, is simply this: I told a machine what I wanted, it produced artifacts I mostly validated against real hardware, and now I’m worried other people will do the same thing maliciously.

Ok, so that’s a legitimate observation trying to elevate himself as dangerous by discovery, a form of self-loathing popularized in superhero comics. Who should have the power of Beowulf, strength of 30 men in one hand? However, this is different because the “Everything I own, owned” title transforms directed labor into personal mastery, which is precisely the ideological move that invokes plantation logic and makes it invisible to the person performing it.

The plantation owner doesn’t understand cotton or corn mash at the level the labor does. He understands command. He mistakes the power to direct for the competence to produce. Then he takes ownership of the output and writes about what he accomplished. Therefore the post title belongs to the agent. He specified goals. Claude did the reasoning, the tool use, the cross-validation, the documentation, the patch generation. This guy says he typed “keep going” and such 98 times and then called it his agent-driven research.

Here’s more detail on a specific example. He rejects his monitor manufacturer’s authority, from actual engineers who actually understand OLED degradation, and instead practices unexamined authority over Claude, whose outputs he also won’t fully trust. He’s too afraid to flash the patch. So he rejects the expert, says he commands the labor, and then can’t use his “own” product.

My ASUS ROG Swift PG42UQ monitor was actually where I started, because I got annoyed at the pop-up overlay that comes up every once in a while that tells me to run “pixel cleaning”. I have never intentionally run pixel cleaning on this monitor and I never will, I don’t care, and I would like for that overlay to go away forever. […] The pixel cleaning warning turns out to have no native way to disable it, and it’ll always show up after 8 hours of runtime. Oh well. Claude did find the appropriate area to patch to kill the functionality though. I haven’t actually been brave enough to write a modified firmware to the thing yet – it’s a pretty expensive monitor – but I’ll get there at some point.

I feel like I’m reading an Plantation owners guide to making bourbon, forcing a black man to figure it out and distill faster, where the ignorant Slaver even says he’s afraid to drink his “own” drink.

He believes he has maximized freedom from constraint (no pixel cleaning, no vendor tools, no authority over his hardware) and yet he hasn’t achieved the actual capacity to act effectively. His monitor is now neglected and governed by nobody. Not the manufacturer, not him.

Negative liberty is being mistaken for positive liberty.

There’s a Dunning-Kruger smell to this, where he has enough knowledge to feel confident rejecting expert guidance, and not enough to act on his own alternative. The reverse engineering process gives him procedural knowledge (how the firmware works), which he mistakes for the actual level of institutional knowledge embedded in the pixel cleaning feature. Years of OLED panel engineering and failure-mode data ignored, because of ignorance.

That’s someone craving epistemic autonomy without working to reach epistemic competence. He performs the dance of Enlightenment (reject received authority, reason from first principles) and stops far short, before the discipline that makes his moves legitimate. The Enlightenment actually demanded rigorous self-examination and accountability for conclusions. He substitutes automated, routine technical procedure for the discipline of thinking. Oh, the irony of becoming a useless cog while claiming to own the machine. Running reverse engineering tools is not even close to the same as understanding what the manufacturer knows about long-term OLED degradation, let alone electronics maintenance.

His github repo also shows pinned work with ATF Form 5320.23 generator (NFA firearms transfer paperwork), reverse engineering RH25 thermal weapon optics, and “rof-gui — Quantifies your dakka” (rate-of-fire measurement).

In conclusion, a graduate of North Carolina State University offers danger through a presence that withdraws accountability. He calls himself the “100% snowman” and ends “Everything I own, owned” with a melting face. The snowman melts in cheerful dissolution, like an invisibility privilege: I did something alarming, you should be afraid of it/me, shrug, melt.

1969 assignment of nationality, pointing to an existing address for absorption, is how Israel used to frame Palestinians. Golda Meir, reflecting on regional identities as all recently designated states, denied anyone would be Palestinian. Her framework said West Bank arabs are Jordanian (a nationality extended to them by Jordan’s 1954 law).

2026 is a completely different story. Denial of humanity, denial of any address, is an escalation to genocide as a statement about the people. This is how officials of the Israeli state speak of Palestinians today.

Meir’s scheme gave the 1948 Arabs citizenship and the West Bankers Jordanian passports, which they held until 1988. Everyone had a legal somewhere, so the peoplehood question was lobbied as a filing decision about which state processes the claim. Notably absent from her theory is Gaza, which left a dangerous gap.

Egypt administered Gaza from 1949 to 1967 and never extended citizenship to people living there. When Egypt retreated from Gaza in the 1967 war, the Gazans who were left behind under Israeli rule weren’t treated as Egyptian or Israeli. They were stateless under Meir, stateless after Camp David, which Sadat negotiated without returning Gaza to Egypt, stateless under Oslo’s interim status, and stateless today. Her framework had no exit for the Gazans, which is how it grew into the crucible of Palestinian nationalism, from the fedayeen era onward.

When you look at the Meir foundations, the exit paths are the focus. Palestinians were to become citizens of Israel and Jordan. Yet Jordan withdrew the exit in 1988, responding to the First Intifada (because Jordan was undermined by the Arab League reaffirmation of its own 1974 Rabat designation of the PLO as “sole representative”, despite King Hussein objections), and the Israeli citizenship track was locked to the 1948 population. So the Gaza equation escalated as an address for people with no address, while Jordan was losing control, challenging her theory.

Fast forward to today and Israeli state officials speak publicly in the register the Genocide Convention defines as incitement.

The Chief Rabbi holds a salaried state office. Under Article III(c) of the Genocide Convention and the ICTR’s Akayesu and Nahimana precedents, authority and audience are what convert dehumanizing rhetoric into incitement.

The Chief Rabbi holds a generational, descendant role. His father Ovadia Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi, said in 2010 that Palestinians should perish from this world and that Abbas should be struck with a plague. His brother Yitzhak preceded him in the same office.

The Chief Rabbi chose a venue with a particular political meaning. Gush Katif Museum commemorates the settlements evacuated from Gaza in 2005, which frames the topic as taking land.

The Chief Rabbi’s speech lands precisely on that old Meir citizenship gap: the one population she never accounted for is the one he dehumanizes, denying their rights, marking their land for destruction and settlement by Jews only.

In an address at West Jerusalem’s Gush Katif Museum, Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Yosef denied Palestinians exist as a people and said they ‘have no rights’. He also claimed Gaza and occupied West Bank cities for Jews, and called for Gaza’s destruction and Jewish settlement.

Itamar Ben-Gvir stood on fresh concrete this week and posted the video. Israel’s national security minister toured the foundations of a death row and hanging facility inside a maximum-security prison in central Israel, pointed at the ground, and promised executions. The complex will include viewing booths so that families of victims can watch. Ben-Gvir said the booths follow the American model.

Days earlier the same minister advocated thirty to forty targeted killings per night in Gaza, extending beyond people posing any immediate threat, and said of the people there:

They are not even people.

The French foreign minister called the remarks inhumane.

The German chancellor said they violate international law.

Notably, Ben-Gvir himself already has been convicted for incitement to racism and support of a terrorist organization (Kahane’s Kach Party).

Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. His movement didn’t die. It radicalized. Baruch Goldstein, a Kach follower, massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in 1994. Yigal Amir, a Kahanist inspired by Goldstein, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The man who signed Oslo, the man who could negotiate. Weeks before the killing, a teenage Itamar Ben-Gvir brandished an ornament stolen from Rabin’s car on live television and said: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”

Ben-Gvir was exempted from military service because of his extremism. He was convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization. He kept a portrait of Goldstein above his fireplace. In 2022, Netanyahu brought him into government as National Security Minister. Bezalel Smotrich, another Kahanist, became Finance Minister.

Despite all this, since December 2022 Ben-Gvir has directed Israel’s police and its prison service.

The gallows enforces a specific legal architecture. That architecture has a very well-known direct precedent from the Holocaust, and the precedent was adjudicated.

Start with the statute. On March 30, 2026 the Knesset passed the Death Penalty for Terrorists law, 62 votes to 48, with Netanyahu voting in person. I published a full analysis of its civil-court provision, which prescribes death or life imprisonment for killing “with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel.” The intent element was engineered to keep Jewish defendants outside its reach, a design confirmed at passage by the Israel Democracy Institute. The same statute operates differently in the military courts. There death becomes the only available sentence, with life imprisonment reserved for a judicial finding of special circumstances.

The military courts try Palestinians. Jewish Israelis accused of comparable violence in the same territory answer to civilian courts, where the intent element shields them. One statute, two tracks. The civilian track carries the definitional exemption. The military track carries the mandatory gallows.

Four structural elements follow. The statute’s application rests on group membership. It makes death the default sentence rather than the maximum. It routes the targeted population through a separate court system. It exempts a group through definitional language alone.

This is the precise setup of RGBl. 1941 I S. 759, the Nazi decree of December 4, 1941 on penal law for Poles and Jews in the annexed eastern territories.

That decree created a separate criminal code for two populations, prescribed death for offenses that carried ordinary penalties for Germans, and ran the trials through special courts outside the regular system. Section I(3) made death the sentence for hostile remarks about Germany and for tearing down official notices. Section V(1) assigned every trial to the Sondergericht. The Austrian National Library holds the scan of the original gazette pages, linked above. Read it. The whole apparatus takes three pages. It needed only a ministerial signature. The Israeli statute carried a parliamentary majority, 62 to 48.

Section III(2) of the decree deserves its own paragraph. Death is imposed wherever the law threatens it. Where the law provides for a lesser sentence, the court imposes death anyway upon finding a besonders niedrige Gesinnung, an especially base disposition, a rule the decree extends expressly to juvenile offenders. The decree drew its life and death line through a judicial finding about the defendant’s inner state. The Israeli statute does the same work in reverse. An intent clause selects who dies. A special-circumstances finding decides who lives. Both instruments place the capital line inside a disposition judgment rendered by the separate system, and both write that judgment into the statute as the mechanism of the differential itself.

Defenders of the Israeli statute surely will argue that the 1941 decree made trivial conduct capital, any “anti-German” remark, a torn poster, while the new law attaches to “murder” convictions. The conviction data explains why this doesn’t land. The military courts convict at a rate of 99.74 percent, by the system’s own annual report, and the overwhelming majority of convictions arrive through plea bargains. A murder conviction produced by the separate system is an output of the separate system. The predicate is manufactured inside the differential, which is exactly how the special courts of 1941 supplied theirs.

The 1941 decree went to trial. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal in United States v. Altstoetter (1947), the Justice Case, prosecuted the Reich Ministry of Justice officials who drafted differential penal law and the special-court judges who applied it. The Tribunal treated the decree as an instrument of the extermination program, applied the new term genocide to a legal system, and convicted ten defendants, among them the ministry’s former acting head and a sitting judge. Its most quoted sentence:

The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.

That describes Israel today.

The theory of liability matters more than the rhetoric. Altstoetter established that operating a group-differential death statute through a separate court system is itself a crime against humanity, independent of any single execution. The Tribunal convicted the drafters and the appliers. Applied to 2026, that theory reaches the Knesset members who wrote the exemption, the military judges who will impose the mandatory sentence, and the officials building the facility.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has petitioned the Supreme Court to strike the law down. The petition is pending. The state’s answer is concrete. Enforcement infrastructure rises ahead of adjudication. The Altstoetter defendants argued that valid legal form made their conduct lawful. The Tribunal convicted them for that reliance.

The Justice Case settled whether legal office protects the operators of such an instrument. It ruled the robe is part of the crime.

Israel abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954, six years after executing Meir Tobianski, an innocent man, by firing squad on the day of his arrest.

The Tobianski gravestone reads killed by mistake.

The abolition was a founding correction, the state admitting what state killing does, and why it is incompatible with the state. The new genocide viewing booths are an attempt to repeal the state of Israel.