War

by Sarmad Ishfaq We are witnessing the genocide of the Palestinians based on algorithms and machine learning; a system of apartheid in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip reinforced by artificial intelligence; and surveillance and facial recognition systems of such prowess that Orwell’s 1984 regime would be green with envy. Today’s Israeli-occupied Palestine manifests […]

Israel/ Palestine

Gaza and Ukraine Wars Causing Massive Pollution, Environmental Damage

The Conversation

By Richard Marcantonio, University of Notre Dame and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez, University of Notre Dame | – (The Conversation) – As wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, another location ravaged by conflict is taking steps to implement a historic peace agreement. From the mid-1960s through 2016, Colombia was torn by conflict between the government, […]

Donald Trump

The Forever Wars, MAGA and the Loneliness of Anger

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com) – An acquaintance who hails from the same New Jersey town as I do spends his free weekends crawling through the woods on his stomach as part of a firearms training course, green camouflage paint on his face and a revolver in his hand. He considers this both a way to have fun […]

Dissent

War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young

Tomdispatch

By Norman Solomon ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval […]

Dissent

Columbia Students are Sick at Heart, just as we were in ’68

Waging Nonviolence

Mark Rudd ( Waging Nonviolence ) – What is the ethical response to witnessing a great moral crime? Turn away and allow oneself to be distracted? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or acknowledge the crime for what it is, and take some sort of action to try to stop it? Students at Columbia in 1968 understood […]

Artificial Intelligence

Gaza War: Artificial Intelligence is radically changing Targeting Speeds and Scale of Civilian Harm

The Conversation

By Lauren Gould, Utrecht University; Linde Arentze, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and Marijn Hoijtink, University of Antwerp | – (The Conversation) – As Israel’s air campaign in Gaza enters its sixth month after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, it has been described by experts as one of the most relentless […]

Artificial Intelligence

A Brief History of Kill Lists, From Langley to Lavender

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink ) – The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men […]

Artificial Intelligence

Gaza Conflict: Israel using AI to identify Human Targets raises Fears Innocents are Targeted

The Conversation

By Elke Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London | – A report by Jerusalem-based investigative journalists published in +972 magazine finds that AI targeting systems have played a key role in identifying – and potentially misidentifying – tens of thousands of targets in Gaza. This suggests that autonomous warfare is no longer a future scenario. […]

Climate Crisis

“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds:” Genocide and Ecocide stalk the Earth

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com ) – When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing […]