Emer O'Daly

Design Fellow @UCDArch

[liam cunningham @liamcunningham1]

There’s extraordinary stuff going on in Albania at the moment. Corporate media barely covering this. Funny that.
Check it out.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

How is this not headline news all around the world?

Why aren't these images everywhere?

Imagine if this was an Israeli baby.

[Emer O'Daly @emerodaly]

SAVE SOZA . STOP DEMOLITION . RENOVATION FIRST - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/yWckLKUhag via @Change

[Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 @OmarHamadD]

Not a single stone remains standing, nor a tree, nor a human being—Israel has completely annihilated my town, Beit Hanoun.

[Motasem A Dalloul @AbujomaaGaza]

This is how Gaza was before the Israeli genocide

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

There is a name for boarding a ship and abducting innocent civilians in international waters, @BBCWorld. Its not called 'interception'. The word is piracy.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

On the third year of genocide, as Gaza gets hit by a plague of rats/fleas, EU bureaucratese and charity posturing are simply unsufferable.

Uphold the Law.
Stop arming & trading with Israel.
Ensure ICC arrest warrants are enforced.
Defend the defenders.
Only then, talk charity.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated.

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: https://t.co/3YJk88k4QY): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

[Ethan Levins 🇺🇸 @EthanLevins2]

Apple has removed Lebanese village names in Southern Lebanon.

As Israel invades, they are already setting the state to justify occupation.

I’ve never seen something like this.

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

Justo hoy, Netanyahu lanza su ataque más duro contra el Líbano desde que empezó la ofensiva.

Su desprecio por la vida y el derecho internacional es intolerable.

Toca hablar claro:

- Líbano debe formar parte del alto al fuego.

- La comunidad internacional debe condenar esta nueva violación del derecho internacional.

- La Unión Europea debe suspender su Acuerdo de Asociación con Israel.

- Y no debe haber impunidad ante estos actos criminales.

[Mark Ruffalo @MarkRuffalo]

We need a mass world coalition to stop Israel’s genocidal march throughout the Middle East and the lawless terrorism and apartheid within its own borders. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction is the recipe to stop further violence. It’s Dr Martin Luther King’s strategy of peaceful change. We must deploy it en mass and create a coalition of those who we may not agree with politically on other fronts but find common ground on this rolling justice. It has awoken the moral center in most people.

[Dyab Abou Jahjah @Aboujahjah]

Israel has now become the first state to codify a death sentence that applies in practice to one ethnic group, while another is effectively shielded from it.

[Abdulruhman Ismail @a_abdulruhman]

The boy who saw seventy bullets pierce through his family in Tammun said: "I asked the soldier, 'Do you love your father and mother?' He replied, 'Yes.' I said to him, 'Then why are you killing my father and mother?' So he slapped me across the face."
Noor Abu Salma

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Ending Israeli Apartheid will be a rehumanising act -and a liberation- for both Palestinians and Israelis.
No one can treat other humans as the Israeli society treats the Palestinians, and not lose their humanity in the process.

[Philip Oldfield @SustainableTall]

Why aren’t we building more suburbs like this?

Freiburg’s Solarsiedlung (Solar Settlement) is 20 years old, built from a simple timber frame, and its solar panels produce *4 TIMES* the energy the residents use.

[Art Gallery @X_ArtGallery]

Guy Buffet - The Making of the Perfect Martini

[Emer O'Daly @emerodaly]

High levels of ‘forever chemical’ found in cereal products across Europe – study.. The highest levels were found in Irish breakfast cereal(!) https://t.co/Q2yEfNXBJ9

[Emer O'Daly @emerodaly]

Medicinal properties of nature not to be underestimated https://t.co/Exdt8iWFp9

[University College Dublin @ucddublin]

👩‍🎓🏛️ Representatives of the Oireachtas have heard that Ireland risks overshooting its carbon budgets unless immediate measures are taken to reduce emissions in the construction sector.

Head of the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, Dr Oliver Kinnane, told the Oireachtas Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy that “much work is required” to balance continued construction with the need to meet national carbon targets.

“Construction is inherently carbon-intensive,” he said. “More buildings will add carbon emissions in the short-term through the emissions embodied in the materials they are constructed with and in the longer term through a life cycle of operation."

“Housing targets have increased from 33,000 per year to over 50,000. This increase will bring considerable additional embodied carbon as a result of the use of current methods of construction.”

Presenting research funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), Research Ireland and the European Commission, Dr Kinnane said Ireland had already slightly exceeded its first carbon budget period of 2021 to 2025, but in the next five years, it was forecast to overshoot its second carbon budget by 20% to 25%.

These carbon budgets are legal limits on the total amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted over five-year periods.

In construction, some two-thirds of these emissions are operational in nature, and one-third are the embodied carbon emissions associated with building, maintenance, and demolition.

With 300,000 homes and associated infrastructure expected to be built over the next decade, the committee heard that, under current housing delivery methods, any carbon reductions from increased operational efficiencies would be offset by the emissions associated with their construction.