"[Palestinians] are not superior to any other life, but no other life is superior to us."
Palestinian-American activist, academic, and author Noura Erakat tells @mehdirhasan.bsky.social about the double standard the West applies to war crimes against Palestinians.
Watch: zeteo.com/p/iran-gaza-...
If you’re looking for an example of technofascism this is it: Palantir’s manifesto.
See also my article on technofascism link.springer.com/article/10.1...
On April 15, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed. @DeptofWar #OpSouthernSpear
Despite the administration’s rhetoric and bogus legal theories, the supposed armed conflict with “narco-terrorists” appears to be entirely make believe.
Murder is the general term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict.
@pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social published an essay I wrote related to my book “Artificial Religion” pghrev.com/the-myths-we... and an excerpt of the book pghrev.com/talk-to-me-p... on publication day 🙂
My new book "Artificial Religion" is published today by @mitpress.bsky.social !!!
mitpress.mit.edu/978026205221...
We stand in solidarity with the Catholic community in the wake of President Trump’s attack on Pope Leo.
Between denigrating the pope, portraying himself as Jesus, and sarcastically praising Allah, the president’s mockery of religion is both deranged and insulting.
"While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern—or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed—this volume argues that racialization is foundational to the discipline, shaping its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors."
It's open access!
"So, rather than asking whether the US military is hiding casualties, a more productive question is this: What kinds of deaths are allowed to appear, and under what conditions? ... Because the ... numbers themselves are part of the machinery through which war is made acceptable."
The Pentagon suggested Iran was responsible. But new evidence further shows tit were U.S. PrSMs (which blast thousands of tungsten pellets outwards) that killed 21 civilians in Lamerd, Iran, including a toddler and several children. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/w...
"The spending proposal suggests the [DoD] intends to transform the DAWG into an Autonomous Warfare Command, which would be a jt org focused on orchestrating drone & boat swarms in a Hellscape-like scenario. The template already exists w/ Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force & Russia’s Rubicon complex."
“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.
AI-enabled targeting can allow a military to cause unprecedented civilian death tolls whilst claiming data-driven precision, writes Future of Life Institute head of military AI governance Anna Hehir. We need legally binding national and international rules on the use of AI in warfare, she says.
Whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative.
www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-...
This thread shares three stories from Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria, shedding light on the often overlooked human cost of conflict—the lives lost and family members left to navigate the aftermath
airwars.org/casualty-rec...
This is an excellent and moving read: "This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest." Indeed. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...
The dangers of militarized AI are no longer theoretical—they’re already here. To effectively resist the harms and contain the technology’s human cost, we must look beyond Anthropic’s immediate dispute with the DoD and enforce clear humanitarian obligations, argues Tech Justice Law’s Madeline Batt.
"Despite Hegseth’s claims of a new type of American strategy, and his slap-down of the 'foolish...leaders of the past', his promise of 'the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history' appears to be less an innovative approach to warfare than a recycled version of the same old thing."
..."Instead, they still exist, and technological development, positive in itself, is being placed at the service of war. This is not progress, it is regression.” 2/2
Pope Leo: "Airplanes should always be carriers of peace, never of war. No one should be afraid that threats of death & destruction might come from the sky...After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombings should have been banned for ever...” 1/2
LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...
"One of the more pronounced features of the Gaza doctrine—and of contemporary warfare more generally—is turning life-saving medical sites like hospitals, health clinics, and ambulances into targets..."
Excerpt of book in Bloomberg Businessweek
“God, It’s Terrifying”: How the Pentagon Got Hooked on AI War Machines — excerpt of PROJECT MAVEN book in Bloomberg Businessweek
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
It is not LLMs that matter, but "what Maven did to the process: it consolidated the systems, compressed the time & reduced the people...The US mil has been trying to close the gap b/w seeing something & destroying it for as long as that gap has existed & every attempt has produced the same failure."
“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science, because it’s baked into this technology”
screenshot of FT headline reading "The AI-driven ‘kill chain’ transforming how the US wages war Systems from Palantir and Anthropic are helping to turn torrents of battlefield data into thousands of strikes" https://www.ft.com/content/fedb262e-e6db-40bc-a4d0-080812f0f82b
"The aspect of AI which sabotages it in social settings, its tendency to generate collateral damage through out-of-distribution errors & so-called hallucinations, ceases to be a problem in conflicts where maximum indiscriminate damage is the actual point" zenodo.org/records/1890...
A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the worldview within US military targeting operations that underpins such strikes: Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud has written an excellent book, "The World According to Military Targeting."
bsky.app/profile/mitp...
Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at AI Now: "The difference often separating AI-DSS, which is how they're currently being used & AI-driven AWS is a human in the loop...If Anthropic itself admits that its models are too unreliable for LAWS, that would imply they are not reliable for AI-DSS either..."
Most of the talk about OpenAI, Anthropic and “mass surveillance” neglected to mention that widespread scraping of the web is in itself mass surveillance.
“[D]ual use” as an idea and/or as a materially identifiable site, object, or body is a fiction of liberal lawmaking & warmaking. Drawing on the notion of ‘martial politics’ we argue that civ & mil spaces are importantly co-constitutive, co-produced & thus only ever partially disentangled, if at all.
Algorithmic targeting systems are the perfect tools to obliterate rules of engagement, as humans who are considered bottlenecks to decision making,"rubber stamp" machine decisions after seconds of deliberation, & acceptable level of collateral damage is increased to reflect expanded ability to kill.
