> This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is

Paying for access to information is not democracy

Oppression is a spectrum. I wouldn't compare "taxes" to something like, I don't know, killing gay people and forcing women to cover their bodies and hair.

> Especially when most left leaning folks in western world has hard sympathies with hamas

I'm not going to take your comment seriously due to this wild opinion.

I think citizens in those countries recognize that allowing a repressive regime to exist simply for cheap oil costs is not necessarily a good solution, either.