welcometowinstanleyslighthouse

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A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it? Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [3] - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy"). One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect. But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a "private" social network, including "end-to-end" encryption of messages. Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of "pre-crime" targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in "pre-crime".

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i need some advice!! recently i got suspended from school because i fought another person. he saw me wearing an iraq flag pin and called me a terrorist so i punched him. the thing is is that i dont feel that bad because i later found out that he was anti-palestine, should i feel bad tho?

Im proud of you. Do it again

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Please support this Sudanese family. They are very far from reaching their goal.

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The Slavery Abolition Act didn’t apply to India or Ceylon, and though it technically liberated over 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean and Africa, all of them (excepting only small children) were forced to continue to labor as unpaid “apprentices” for a further six years, on pain of punishment. Under the terms of the act, they were protected against overwork and direct violence from employers, but remained their “transferable property,” subject to punishment for  “indolence,” “insolence,” or “insubordination.” So many black West Indians were jailed for resisting these outrageous terms that full   emancipation was eventually brought forward to August 1, 1838. [...] A century on, the independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.” In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual  budget -- the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. 

Text by: Fara Dabhoiwala. “Speech and Slavery in the West Indies.” The New York Review of Books. 20 August 2020. [Published online at: nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/speech-slavery-west-indies/]

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Deaths in Sudan could reach 10,000 per day in the coming months if the mass displacement of people caused by a year-long civil war sparks famine. The dire projection, which represents a worst case scenario and would put the conflict on a par with the worst days of the Battle of the Somme, was being urgently debated by Western envoys and diplomats this week. Other actors, including the World Food Programme, say the estimates are exaggerated but accept that a major humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding.

It is already the world’s biggest single displacement crisis, with up to 11 million people, including four million children, forced from their homes and farms. Millions of refugees have fled into neighbouring Chad and South Sudan. And, across the region, some 25 million people are now unable to feed themselves properly, with at least five million on the cusp of famine, according to the United Nations.

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(Guy whos never been at risk from systemic violence voice) No i think all violence is bad guys. You know. The cycle of violence. I think both sides are bad!

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🚀 People trying to blame Iran for this measured and calculated “escalation” conveniently ignore the facts. The real question is why are the UK and US so quick to condemn Iran for its attacks tonight, but so unwilling to condemn the Israeli attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria?

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This was published yesterday, which is the same day Israel had struck a school, a mosque, a marketplace, multiple residential areas, some within refugee camps, killing over 60 Palestinians. This was posted one day after Israel had assassinated 3 sons of Hamas leader Hanyeh and killed four of their children in the same attack.

So by "low intensity" do they mean ~100 Palestinians killed a day? How do I tell you that even 1 Palestinian killed is one too many and that, if this so called low intensity scale of killing continues for just 10 days, we will have ~1000 Palestinians killed by the end of it?

It's sickening to see how the continuous killing and genocide has been normalised with language that is so dehumanising. Not only are people not shying away from stating that they do not view Palestinian lives to be as equal as other lives, they're also publishing articles about it.

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European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (@ursulavonderleyen) was interrupted by a protestor accusing her of complicity in genocide as she began her speech to a conference on strengthening the weapons industry. She smiled through the entire interruption.

—

@electronicintifada

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Please share this around

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good read for teachers.

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Historical video of the day: A young terrorist Ben Gvir, years before he became the National Security Minister of Israel, leads Israeli mobs in taunting and attacking Palestinian store owners in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron (Al Khalil), who are only guilty of trying to earn a living and protecting their property.

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Heartbreaking scenes captured by @feras_.nader.99 of Palestinians in Rafah visiting loved ones killed by the occupation in the last 6 months.

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This is a big plan, they are stealing the land!