Speaking of obvious falsehoods, I’m going to ask you to provide a single verifiable report of Hamas using human shields from anyone not directly tied to the Israeli state.

Not the distortion of humanitarian law which assumes that the mere presence of unarmed people suspected of being affiliated with Hamas means any civilians around them are “shields”, because unarmed people regardless of affiliation are not lawful combatants.

Not the absurd claim that suspected tunnels underneath civilians justify the massacre of those civilians in order to target military infrastructure.

Not the unverified testimonies of people with a history of fabricating lies on behalf of the Israeli government.

Just any single instance of someone in Hamas forcing a nearby civilian to endanger their life on their behalf, from a source that is not ultimately the Israeli government or military itself.

Quoting from the UN report “Anatomy of a genocide”, I have edited out the annotations but there are sources for every single one of the claims listed if you would like to verify yourself:

IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields. Their use constitutes a war crime, as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations. When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians. Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.

Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’. UN independent fact-finding missions and reputable human rights organizations have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated. Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted – to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault.

After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”. In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”. The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”. Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.

International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack. The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain.

Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

It doesn’t have to be a kill list, that’s what you’re not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that’s the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.

You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?

They’re already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it’s trying to deport without due process, what’s to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?

What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It’s not duplicated effort, it’s part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.

Yep it’s actually Israel that has routinely and systematically employed captured Palestinians as human shields. For some background, there is this recent article in Haaretz stemming from anonymous IDF soldier reports, titled “In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves”.

Here’s a different source for you.

The National Institutes of Health will begin collecting Americans’ private health records as part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial plan to discover a cause and a cure for autism. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a panel of experts about the plan this week.

The NIH plans to gather information from a wide range of private sources, including pharmacy chains, hospitals and wearable devices with health sensors, like smartwatches.

“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” Bhattacharya told the panel, according to The Guardian. “Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.”

The NIH did not return a request for comment.

Kennedy has made autism research a central pillar of his role as America’s official health advocate. He has made a number of conspiratorial, anti-science claims, including that childhood vaccinations could cause autism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Earlier this month, he called autism an “epidemic” and vowed to find an “environmental toxin” responsible for the disorder by September.

“Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate,” Kennedy told reporters at the time. “We’re going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly.”

He further described autism as “a preventable disease.”

[…]

Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also has a controversial background in the medical community, questioning early on the lethality of COVID-19 and being a vocal opponent to lockdown mandates.

“This is what happens in a dictatorship, and these are test cases,” said Eric Lee, a lawyer who represents Momodou Taal, a Cornell University Ph.D. student and advocate for Palestinian rights whose visa was revoked. “If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won’t save you. … Your views will be next.”

Taal sued the government on the grounds of free speech this year. After the case was filed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement called on Taal to turn himself in for deportation. Taal didn’t turn himself in and continued the case until just over a week ago, when he issued a public statement on X sharing that he had left the country.

“Given what we have seen across the United States,” he wrote, “I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted.”

The suit has now been withdrawn, but Taal’s lawyers say the implications of this case go well beyond their client.

“The First Amendment applies to people who are physically in the United States, regardless of their alienage, regardless of what country they were born in, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their immigration status,” Lee said. “By … saying that attending a protest makes one a threat to American foreign policy, the administration is admitting that the Constitution is getting in the way of the fight for democracy. Something is not right there.”

Genocide is actually very clearly defined under international law. To quote directly from the source:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Any single one of these criteria individually is enough to meet the definition of genocide. Every single one of these has already occurred and is ongoing, and it is only through pure delusion, media control, and wishful ignorance that anyone can claim otherwise.

There is virtually no dissent among actual scholars and experts in the field of international law, Israel is unequivocally perpetrating genocide. They have simply not been held to account for their actions yet, due primarily to complicity from allies and collaborators who do not want to be criminalized for their actions as well. People are also not their rulers, and they have been watching those running their governments provide diplomatic, strategic, and political cover for some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Make no mistake though, justice will come for Israel, and hopefully every state and individual actor who has supported and covered for it as well.

For people like yourself, I hope you understand that at some point in the future you’re going to have to live in a world that sees you for exactly what you are. Israel will be remembered as exactly what it is, and you will know you were one of its defenders.

When you hear stories of traumatized, maimed, orphaned children, of mothers forced to endure c sections without anesthesia, of the weeping friends and family of journalists, medical workers, educators, caretakers, and innocents of all walks of life as they and their loved ones were targeted and massacred by an inhuman genocidal apartheid state, you will have to reckon with the fact that you stood on the side of the perpetrators.

This is going to backfire in a big way. Whole lot of people seem to think this will be justice porn or somehow convince his base of his criminality but it is going to do no such thing. According to one poll, the majority (77%) of likely GOP primary voters are already convinced the trial is “politically motivated”, with only 8% more concerned about him attempting to overturn an election. You can take a look at some polling here, there are other even more troublesome results as well: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poll-indictments-2023-08-20/

No matter how awful, contradictory, and ridiculous he will be in that court room, this is likely going to be a massive boon for Trump, and his followers are going to see it as the realization of their own fears of persecution. This man is an ascendant fascist leader, not the sad sack finally facing consequences that liberals so desperately want him to be, and the effect this will have on mobilizing his base to continue to escalate will be immense. These people do not give a single fuck about “”“law and order”“” no matter how much they pretend they do, stop assuming they will just accept things when he is found guilty. They won’t.

I’m just trying to help people realize how dangerous and precarious this whole situation is. People were laughing and making jokes when he first announced his candidacy, and kept on doing it right up to the point that he won the election. Don’t make the same mistake again, because while yall are cracking jokes, him and his ghouls are hurting people. They are passing discriminatory laws, they are in the supreme court setting dangerous precedents and overturning inconvenient ones, and they are patrolling the streets looking for people to brutalize and throw in jail. They are committing hate crimes and becoming increasingly radicalized and mobilized.

Stop pretending this is entertainment or business as usual, it’s not. I’m begging you to understand that the fascists are already here, and the longer they’re underestimated the better their chances of seizing control.

Genuinely sickening to see these attempts at cloaking this as something they’re doing out of care for children, and not the monstrous fascist secret police bullshit it is.

“DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused, and sex trafficked,” the homeland security department said in a statement to Fox 11 Los Angeles.

God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn’t using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn’t really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”

A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I’ll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.

First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It’s entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.

I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.

This might sound absurd, but we’re seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into “criminals”, “gang members”, and “terrorists” by similar logic.

Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other “diseased offspring” long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.

How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don’t like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK’s set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.