james atkinson

It started out as Hogwarts
- now it's Lord of the Flies 💩

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Find time to read this quite astonishingly good piece by
@ArwaM Mahdawi. Brilliant on our government's appalling moral confusion over Gaza

"Why is Hasan Piker ‘not conducive to the public good’? Because on Gaza, we punish the witness, not the crime"

https://t.co/lxF64weMUN

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

I think they blackballed me because of this.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Computex this week that AI agents will replace your phone as the center of your digital life. The agent follows you across every device, earbuds, glasses, phone, laptop, and never turns off. 6G networks will "make all of us into walking cameras," and by tracking millions of radio connections, network operators will build a digital twin of every road, car, bicycle, and pedestrian in your city. "Resistance is futile," Amon said.

My Take
A CEO just stood on stage and told investors his company's vision is an AI agent that follows you everywhere, sees what you see, hears what you hear, and feeds it all into a digital replica of your city where every person and vehicle is tracked. He said "resistance is futile" like that was a selling point and not a threat.

This week Ring got sued for labeling people's faces without consent. Microsoft put "make people addicted" in a strategy doc. MicroAGI sent cameras into apartments. And now Qualcomm is pitching the hardware layer that ties all of it together into one continuous feed from your earbuds to a datacenter, running around the clock. Each company sells its piece as a standalone product, but they all benefit from the same outcome: you generate data constantly and it flows through their compute. Amon says economics will drive adoption and he's probably right. But I haven't heard a single person on any of these stages this week ask whether the people generating all that data actually want this future. The pitch is always to investors, never to the public. I feel like that should bother more people than it does.

Hedgie🤗

[Hasan alrabay @HasanEssam29636]

One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death.

Gaza in 2023 and 2026!

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

A former senior colleague of Raffi Berg, now the BBC's Middle East online editor, forensically analyses his output as a BBC writer.

It shows a consistent pattern of humanising Israeli soldiers and settlers while dehumanising Palestinians, and burying information that might place Israel in a bad light – talents that seem to have led to his promotion to BBC editor.

Martin Asser concludes: "The world Berg presents in his early BBC features is a rich source of misinformation and / or disinformation."

This article should prove useful to Owen Jones' legal team as they fight Berg's defamation case. Jones cited 13 BBC journalists who accused Berg of skewing the corporation's coverage to make Israel look good.

More here: https://t.co/IcsHVGiCNw

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I’m over here recycling toilet paper roll cores, using my own bags, not running the water when I brush my teeth, while billionaires are blowing up rockets and building water-polluting data centers. It’s hard not to be discouraged.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Israel subjects Palestinian detainees / hostages to industrialised torture.

There's been an avalanche of testimonies about this throughout the genocide - and before.

Only now does The Economist notice it, because Western activists were abused.

https://t.co/wTIoibu29i

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

This is what Trump's done to the people's house:

A third of it is rubble.

Another third is a cage match.

What a metaphor.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

One of the most detailed testimonies I've heard of the Israeli torture and systematic sexual abuse of Gaza Sumud Flotilla activists abducted in international waters while attempting to bring aid to Gaza

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Palantir’s UK mouthpiece has been uncritically platformed the BBC (multiple times), the Sun, the Times, the Observer & now the Evening Standard.

It’s a really instructive lesson for everyone on how power works & the role the media plays

[james atkinson @kinson1964]

https://t.co/Q2IhTwwG2j

[james atkinson @kinson1964]

@petapixel Unfortunately however it can't just fuck off and die 🤔

[james atkinson @kinson1964]

@GrandTheftNatto @UtterlyInterest You beat me to it 🙄

[THE NERVE @thenerve_news]

Over 2,000 Britons have served for the Israel military in the Gaza war since 7 October 2023. Our political commentator @SangitaMyska argues that it’s essential the government investigate “potential links to war crimes”

[Prof. Katharine Hayhoe @KHayhoe]

This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK's extreme heat this week.

As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that.

First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence.

And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous.

In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.

Here's the bottom line:

Climate is changing. Humans are responsible. And we are experiencing the impacts now. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that solutions already exist, and the majority of people care - 89%, around the world!

But meaningful action depends on helping people understand not just what is happening: we need to know how it affects our lives (this heat wave being example A today) and what we can do about it.

That’s the opportunity this reporting missed.

https://t.co/vYfPDKcWWf

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

🆕My latest column for The Nerve has dropped:

“Over 2000 British Citizens have served in the IDF during the Gaza War. Our Government Doesn't Want To Know’”

It’s time the U.K. Government fulfilled legal obligations & investigated.

Please read and share.

LINK HERE https://t.co/gn7xVQoFCs
@thenerve_news

[Shafiur Rahman @shafiur]

Ko Tinmaung, a Toronto-based Rohingya activist, has been released after more than 96 hours in Israeli detention following Israel’s hijacking of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the abduction of its civilian participants.

His testimony is horrifying.

He says he was beaten in a dark room by more than five people, kicked, punched, tasered in multiple places, and handcuffed so tightly that the restraints cut into his wrists and restricted blood flow. He says he still needs treatment for concussion-like injuries.

He also says he witnessed other detainees with broken ribs, head wounds, blood from their ears, eye injuries, broken noses and broken teeth. Most gravely, he alleges sexual assaults, including people being tasered on their genitals.

Tinmaung’s testimony also exposes the racial dimension of Israeli violence. He says he was mocked as “Ahmed”, assaulted further, laughed at because of his skin colour, and treated as if his passport had no value because he was brown.

This was a civilian-led humanitarian mission carrying food, aid and basic supplies to Gaza. So where is Canada? Where are the human rights organisations? Where are the global leadership councils, the moral authorities, the professional defenders of accountability?

Silence now is not neutrality. It is complicity.

(Video courtesy https://t.co/WdpDXCJTFR)

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Hacktivist group releases names of 69 israeli seamen who attacked the @gbsumudflotilla humanitarians, and puts a $100,000 bounty on each https://t.co/mQDCtme2ln