Olivia
Online
Hamza Humayun
@miangmember
Pakistan
Joined December 2010
1.5K Following
220 Followers
2.9K Posts
It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security. https://t.co/DgkM9RegJ7
🔴 Less than a week after Israel burned several preteen children to death in their tents, four more residential apartments were set ablaze overnight, with Israel’s military burning entire families to death as they slept.
The strikes hit homes in Al-Shati refugee camp, the Karama neighborhood, Tel al-Hawa, and Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City.
IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]
![yanisvaroufakis's tweet photo. IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HHsnlr9WIAEr4Cw.jpg)
Whatever was left of the "West's" moral standing and credibility was destroyed here, in Gaza.
Gaza will be rebuilt, but it will take a Herculean effort to rebuild the standing of the West.
"Let's just arm one more group of moderate rebels... It'll work this time; I can feel it!" This is the gamblers fallacy in action.
Graham is laying the groundwork for decades of chaos and blow back terrorism. The concept of sending arms to the locals sounds good at first but has never served our long-term interests.
Our efforts to "arm the people" of governments we don't like led to the rise of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, every Shia militia in Iraq as well as the destabilization of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, just to name a few.
I say this as a former Green Beret and CIA Paramilitary Ops officer who has been involved in these operations- they simply don't work in the long run.
There is no military solution to our conflict with Iran, POTUS should stop listening to those who have not updated their thinking since 2003 and get us out of this mess before we are sucked further in.
A collapse of American sanctions regime is imminent
dawkins is an idiot in a very specific way, but he’s not idiotic enough to actually think claude is conscious.
what materialists/new atheists like him mean when they say AI may be conscious is not so much that AI is conscious as much as it is an attempt to downplay human consciousness.
they’re essentially making a point. “hey, how ridiculous i sound right now, is how ridiculous you sound thinking human consciousness is universally central.” or, “hey, see that dumb llm that you and i clearly agree isn’t conscious? yup, you’re made of the exact same stuff. see how stupid you sound now?”
there’s also unfortunately no way to rebut them without disclaiming you are using poetry. you cannot use “science” to plead the case because science is a materialist tool. it is a highly sequestered arena in which we define a rigid speech protocol. its whole trick is the calculus of dividing the whole and annotating its parts. this clever hack works for some things, some small pockets of reducibility, but at large is quite futile.
neuroscientist philosopher iain mcgilchrist argues the materialist trap is basically a failure to see wholes, dominated by the brain left-hemisphere’s proclivity to divide and conquer. the left hemisphere cannot make sense of experience, music, and time. these are the domain of the right hemisphere which experiences “flow” rather than discrete moments. he describes patients with right hemisphere damage who just couldn’t make sense of time in their life. they saw the frames but couldn’t see the movie.
you can dissect the image to find the story but all you’ll get are pixels. you can dissect a violin to find the music but all you’ll get is wood pulp.
consciousness is a whole. it’s a flow. and science doesn’t really know what to do with that.
Nadeem Haque, a highly respected economist, shared his ordeal yesterday as a tenant at One Constitution Avenue Islamabad, where a court order was used to force eviction.
Instead of engaging with the issue, many chose the easier route, attack the individual. “Why were you living in an ‘illegal’ building?”
This same building was regularised by the country’s highest court after directing the owners to pay what it deemed a fair price for the land. Once that happens, on what basis do you go after residents, whether they bought before the judgment or after it?
Are ordinary citizens now expected to conduct forensic legal audits before buying or renting a flat?
Nadeem sb isn’t even an owner. He is a tenant. Why on earth should he be expected to second-guess the entire legal history of a property before signing a lease?
And let’s not pretend this is about principle.
A simple question: how many of you, before renting a house, verify whether it has a completion certificate from the relevant authority? Or whether every approval was properly obtained? You don’t. No one does.
Because in the real world, people rely on a basic assumption that if a building exists, is occupied, and has passed through courts and regulators, it is fit to live in.
Iran’s latest AI Lego video marks a significant pivot. Instead of taunting the US military, it reflects a new chapter in which Tehran will seek peace by reaching out directly to the American people, bypassing the US government. It's a mirror image of the US strategy of the past decades.
Some of the lines are quite noteworthy and will likely resonate with the anti-establishment sentiments prevailing among American youth in particular:
"I love the constitution, the way it was meant. But not the way your leaders bypass consent..."
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.
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.
The BBC just released a documentary on Israeli snipers shooting children in the head.
168 cases. 95 shot in the head or chest. Over two-thirds under age 12.
This has been happening since October 2023.
It is now April 2026.
I welcome the announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon, facilitated through bold and sagacious diplomatic efforts led by President Donald Trump, and express the hope that it will pave the way for sustainable peace.
Pakistan reaffirms its unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon, and will continue to support all efforts aimed at lasting peace in the region .
Alzar la voz contra una guerra ilegal no siempre es cómodo, pero sin duda es lo correcto.
La neutralidad ante la injusticia no es prudencia: es renuncia. Y no renunciaremos a lo que somos.
On this morning’s episode of “j*deo-Christianity is a dem0nic psyop”, let’s check in with an actual biblical scholar to see what these 👺 worshipping evangelicals have wrong.
👀 at ppl like you @tedcruz and @TheOfficerTatum
🫡✝️🇺🇸
*For educational purposes only
**Cr @olivetree1569
Oct 1, 2023: President #JoeBiden and the White House gear up to push for Ukraine aid following a deal averting a government shutdown. https://t.co/xnkAcQ2RXo
👀
@kajakallas Great! Get in your car, drive to Kiev, enlist in the foreign legion, strap on a plate carrier and pick up an AK.
Then we'll know you are engaged in something more than Eurotrash bloviating.
I would like to make a point about the Ukraine/Russia War.
I believe it is the most important point. Here it is:
Right now, as you are reading this, a Ukrainian or Russian teen was in all likelihood killed in action.
Why?
For what?
Ukraine cannot win this war. What Zelenskyy wants is for the US and/or NATO to literally start fighting the Russians, and that's not going to happen because nobody wants nuclear Armageddon and the end of humanity (except possibly Zelenskyy).
So what is the ONLY option? Answer: mark the boundaries where they are right now and stop fighting.
Trump knows this. Vance knows this. Anyone with a brain who understands war knows this.
THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.
And anybody who disagrees with what I just said is either a bloodthirsty warmonger, a lobotomite midwit, or both.
Face reality people.
Last Seen Users on Sotwe
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
240.4M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.7M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
110.1M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.5M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.8M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
87.4M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
81.2M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.8M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.7M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
69.5M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.7M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.7M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
62.2M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
X
@x
60.8M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
60.5M followers