Linkage

After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.

By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

Francesca Albanese says Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention Including: Killing members of a specific group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole and in part. She also found that genocidal acts were approved and given effect after statements of genocidal intent by senior Israeli military and government officials. These acts, Albanese argues, are part of a 'settler-colonial process of erasure' - which has been underway for more than 70 years. She recommends - among other things - an immediate arms embargo on Israel. And for member states to support South Africa in its attempt to prosecute Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Bert's idea appears simple:

   What if your computer made a little noise each time it sends data to Google?

So this is what he did. A piece of software dubbed googerteller designed for his Linux computer that emits a scratchy beep when the computer detects information flowing out from his computer to one of Google's computers.

[…]

After announcing the tool in a tweet the video quickly received over a million views. Spurred by this attention Bert decided to develop his tool further and include trackers not only from Google but also Facebook and dozens of other trackers.

For capitalism’s philosophers, the rent/profit distinction was key. Rents bred complacency and stagnation. The feudal lord got the same rents no matter what. There was no incentive to re-invest those rents in better agri­cultural tools or advanced training for serfs. If your serfs invented a better scythe that let them bring in the harvest in half the time, you, their lord, got no benefit from it. What’s more, the lord on the next estate over faced no threat from the competitive edge your serfs’ bold innovation conferred.

But profit was always subject to competition. For capitalism’s theoreti­cians, competition undergirded capitalism’s virtues. The fear of a rival taking your business with a product that’s better and/or cheaper sets the capitalist on a continuous hunt for efficiencies and in­novations that deliver better products at lower prices. The fear of a rival luring away your best workers – who are not bound to you the way that serfs were bound to their lord’s land – forces you to find ways to keep your staff happy and thus loyal.

To understand this distinction, think of a capitalist who operates a coffee shop that is put out of business by a newer, better coffee shop down the road. That coffee shop tempts away the capitalist’s customers, poaches their best baristas, and eventually the capitalist is un­able to pay rent and goes out of business. The capitalist is ruined.

But what about the landlord who owns the build­ing that the coffee shop once occupied? They’re great. After all, they own a building on the same block as the hottest coffee shop in town. They didn’t have to do any work, but the value of their asset went up, and the next capitalist who comes along will have to part with even more of their profits in order to pay the rent on that asset.

The truth is many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common: they are built on a system of corporate surveillance. Multiple companies, large and small, collect data about where we go, what we do, what we read, who we communicate with, and so on. They use this data in multiple ways and, if it suits their business model, may sell it to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. Addressing this shared reality will better promote human rights and civil liberties, while simultaneously holding space for free expression, creativity, and innovation than many of the issue-specific bills we’ve seen over the past decade.

In other words, whatever online harms you want to alleviate, you can do it better, with a broader impact, if you do privacy first.

I have written for years (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 11/17/21, 3/25/22), as have many others, that Republican complaints about “cancel culture” on campus suppressing free speech are exaggerated. One of the biggest hypocrisies is that so-called free-speech conservatives claim that campus activists are silencing conservatives, but have little to say about blatant censorship and political firings when it comes to Palestine.

This isn’t a mere moral inconsistency. This is the anti-woke agenda at work: When criticism of the right is deemed to be the major threat to free speech, it’s a short step to enlisting the state to “protect” free speech by silencing the critics—in this case, dissenters against US support for Israeli militarism.

But this isn’t just about Palestine; crackdowns against pro-Palestine protests are part of a broader war against discourse and thought. The right has already paved the way for assaults on educational freedom with bans aimed at Critical Race Theory adopted in 29 states.

If the state can now stifle and punish speech against the murder of civilians in Gaza, what’s next? With another congressional committee investigating so-called infiltration by China’s Communist Party, will Chinese political scholars be targeted next (Reuters, 2/28/24)? With state laws against environmental protests proliferating (Sierra, 9/17/23), will there be a new McCarthyism against climate scientists? (Author Will Potter raised the alarm about a “green scare” more than a decade ago—People’s World, 9/26/11; CounterSpin, 2/1/13.)

A bracing editorial.

In the 1970s a nation confronted a crisis of traffic deaths, many of them deaths of children. Protesters took to the streets to fight an entrenched culture of drivers who considered roads their domain alone. But this wasn’t the U.S.—it was the Netherlands. In 1975 the rate of traffic deaths there was 20 percent higher than in the U.S., but by the mid-2000s it had fallen to 60 percent lower than in the U.S. How did this happen?

Thanks to Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”), a Dutch grassroots movement, traffic deaths fell and streets were restored for people, not cars. Today the country is a haven for cyclists and pedestrians, with people of all ages commuting via protected bike lanes and walking with little fear of being run over. It’s time the U.S. and other countries followed that example.

Yes, all of them.

Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall caps a tumultuous week for Tesla. The company laid off more than 10% of its workforce on Monday, and lost two of its highest-ranking executives. A few days later, Tesla asked shareholders to re-vote on CEO Elon Musk’s massive compensation package that was struck down by a judge earlier this year.

Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines.

The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.

The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author.

[…] 

He said that the results showed how the chemicals are powerful surfactants that concentrate on the surface of water, which helps explain why they move from the ocean to the air and atmosphere.

“We thought PFAS were going to go into the ocean and would disappear, but they cycle around and come back to land, and this could continue for a long time into the future,” he said.

As you read this, the Victorian Government is rewriting the laws and legislation that govern how the city we live within looks and feels. In 2024, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform Melbourne's design regulations, and to empower our city to become world-leading in terms of both liveability and design. Join Kerstin Thompson (Kerstin Thompson Architects), Andrew Maynard (Austin Maynard Architects), and Colleen Peterson (Ratio Consultants) to hear about the challenges of our current dysfunctional system, and the opportunities we have right now to reform these laws and create the best possible Melbourne. Hosted by YIMBY Melbourne and featuring three leaders from Melbourne's urban planning, architecture, and design industries, this night is one for enthusiasts and experts alike.