Since Freud we talk about the three narcissistic wounds (I'd rather call them "insults"):

• cosmological: Earth is not the centre of the universe • biological: Man arose from the animal realm • psychological: The majority of personality rests on subconscious factors beyond conscious control.

There have been a lot of further "insults" suggested. I'd add to the list:

• communicative: Communication cannot give Man the assurance that the agent he communicates with is as human as he is.

A lot can be said to elaborate. Three points may suffice:

1) Response behaviour is not a sign of human-likeness; instead human-likeness is already presupposed and actualized (case by case) when the agent the human interacts with displays a certain complexity of response behaviour.

2) The point is not that a machine is "intelligent" when a human observer cannot distinguish its responses from that given by another human being (Turing Test). The point is that we cannot but project animateness and rationality onto all that gives a sufficiently complex response behaviour

3) That furthermore means: If we cannot but presuppose humanness when attributing intelligibility into response behaviour, then we cannot be sure that in self-ascription we can know that we are human instead of being a machine. (We may be machines that feel like being humans.)

I think that this "fourth narcissistic insult" has major consequences, and people already sense them, which is why they feel uncomfortable (even terrified) as well as fascinated when it comes to #AI and LLMs. (Soon) people cannot tell the difference between machines and Man.

At they same time they feel strangely Promethean, with the sting of having created a golem (Mary Shelley). But not the issue of his creation that stands up and rebels against its creator is the issue, but that he himself becomes indistinguishable from the tool he created. It is the disillusionment in the ability and peculiarity of Man that is the insult. That it takes so little to make Man, in brief: The Banality of Man.

i24NEWS staff, "Washington sends Tehran 15-point plan with demands to end Middle East war" https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/americas/artc-washington-proposes-15-point-plan-to-tehran-to-end-middle-east-war-report

Interesting proposals.

I really have to grin that people like Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Mehdi Hasan, and Jeremy Corbyn now find themselves in bed with people like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Megyn Kelly. The irony is hilarious.

When during a two-year war in the Gaza Strip 40,000 civilians perished, across the world the Left screamed "Genocide!". When Iran killed 40,000 civilians during 48 hours, utter silence. What kind of morality is that? Fast-food morality, convenient to snack on while doomscrolling.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, "After the Ayatollah : The death of Ali Khamenei and the end of political Islam’s century-long experiment in power." https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/after-the-ayatollah

A bit meandering but the the author's views on the past 100 years of Islamism and the future after Khamenei are insightful