LibsEatPoop

Noah Samson recently made a video, “Genocide Denial Streamers” with Destiny in the thumbnail. This has made all his orbiters come out to defend him and Israel, and Reddit decided to introduce me to this yapping on my front page.

I ain’t reading all this. Can someone please explain what this latest defense of genocide is? I skimmed through it, and it seemed they were arguing about the ICJ, which I thought was already settled by the fact they refused Israel’s demand to throw out the case and are pursuing it at all.

Here's his tweet:

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have both published major stories making grave, incendiary allegations that aided and abetted Israel’s lie-filled justifications for the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. The substance of these stories, rooted in unsubstantiated/unverified narratives, has been the focus of intense public scrutiny because of questions surrounding their veracity. But there are also significant ethical questions involving some of the authors of these stories and their previous ties to Israeli propaganda efforts.

Both stories were co-authored by anti-Palestinian figures posing as objective journalists. The NYT story “Screams Without Words” asserted there was a systematic, widespread rape and sexual violence program conducted by Palestinians on October 7. Among the issues with this story, which relied heavily on innuendo rather than documentable facts, is the family of one of the alleged victims disputing the accuracy of the Times piece and stating they were interviewed under false pretense for the story. For more on the scrutiny of this story, see:

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/family-of-key-case-in-new-york-times-october-7-sexual-violence-report-renounces-story-says-reporters-manipulated-them/

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/new-york-times-daily-podcast-camera/

The co-author of the Times story, Anat Schwartz, has “liked” multiple tweets supporting genocidal actions in Gaza (she has since deleted her X account). Among these was a statement cited by the ICJ as a statement of possible incitement to genocide. Along with another co-author, Adam Sella, Schwartz pressured an October 7 witness into cooperating with the Times story, saying it was “important… to Israeli hasbara” (propaganda). Schwartz appears to have only started working as a reporter in November 2023. See here:

https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1761249450998022442

https://twitter.com/lailaalarian/status/1761367812583444891

https://twitter.com/talulasha/status/1747763918032773627

The WSJ story “Intelligence Reveals Details of U.N. Agency Staff’s Links to Oct. 7 Attack” laundered dubious Israeli propaganda painting UNRWA, the most vital humanitarian organization operating in Gaza, as a Hamas front organization whose members directly participated in the October 7 attacks.

The WSJ story served as a delivery service for Israeli allegations that even the US government now says it cannot confirm. This story was a crucial piece of propaganda employed to justify the gutting of UNRWA funding by the US and other governments. The co-author of this story, Carrie Keller-Lynn, served in the Israeli military with her close friend whom she credits for developing social media strategy for the IDF during the 2009 Gaza war. Keller-Lynn was also an anti-BDS activist while in university in the US. After photos of her in IDF uniform began circulating, Keller-Lynn locked her X account and previous articles and podcasts detailing her history and views were scrubbed from the internet. See here:

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/1752702933848993908

https://lithub.com/journalism-as-a-front-of-war-on-american-media-and-the-ideology-of-the-status-quo/

These are serious ethical issues, on top of the mounting questions about the accuracy of the stories themselves, that both the NYT and WSJ should publicly address. These publications have great impact on both policy and public understanding of this war. How do they justify allowing such figures to operate as supposedly independent arbiters of the facts?

Contrast this situation—allowing anti-Palestinian figures to write consequential “news” articles, not opinion pieces, for major US publications— with the cases of Palestinian and Arab journalists, and journalists in general who have expressed sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, being told they cannot cover the war because of concerns about their objectivity.

For a broader examination of the way Israel has engaged in a systematic propaganda campaign about the events of October 7 and beyond, see my recent piece, “Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians:”

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/07/gaza-israel-netanyahu-propaganda-lies-palestinians/

Hilarious.

Key Points:

…after spending the last few months periodically poking around the trees inhabited by little birdies, I do have good news for fans of coercive government regulation,” Gruber says. “Apple’s hand was effectively forced. But by China, not the EU.”

“Coercive government regulation” lmao.

Gruber points to a new law in the works in China that will require that 5G devices support RCS in order to receive certification in the country.

Chinese carriers have been proponents of RCS for years, and last year, the Chinese government began the process of codifying into law that to achieve certification, new 5G devices will be required to support RCS. Shockingly, the Chinese government seemingly isn’t concerned that the RCS standard has no provisions for encryption. The little birdies I’ve spoken to all said the same thing: iOS support for RCS is all about China.

“Shockingly”.

Apple would prefer simply to continue ignoring RCS, on the grounds that they want to support neither any new non-E2EE protocols, nor any new carrier-controlled protocols (whether encrypted or not). But when the CCP says device makers must jump to sell their products in China, Apple asks “How high?”

The sheer Sinophobia omg.

One narrative in the months since Apple’s RCS announcement in November has been that the move was driven by the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. The DMA, however, makes no mention of RCS specifically – and now have official confirmation that iMessage is not big enough in the EU to fall under the purview of the DMA.

There goes EU, the saviour of digital rights.

Anyways, what an article.

The whole statement is great btw.

Ireland remains one of the only good white country. Any others you can think of?

The announcement is filled with Libs and Cons in the replies and quotes celebrating. You have people posting Kamala and Biden gifs, calling them Putin shills, of course Israel defenders, and also Greenwald stans, “learn to code“ types etc.

The text:

Dear team,

I am writing to share a challenging update.

Today The Intercept is parting ways with many talented and beloved colleagues.

Like many news outlets, The Intercept is facing significant financial challenges. To become sustainable, we need to make some changes - which unfortunately include 15 staff reductions across the organization.

With the board's approval, the leadership team has a plan that we believe paves the way for a more sustainable financial foundation for The Intercept so that we can continue to produce high-quality investigative journalism. We have also implemented other cost-saving measures, including significant salary cuts for the leadership team and the flattening of the management team, to minimize the impact as much as possible.

If your role is being eliminated, you will receive a calendar invitation within the next fifteen minutes to meet individually with the - message cut off -

We will also hold a staff meeting later this afternoon for the remaining staff. We will use that time to answer questions and discuss our path forward. Meeting details will be shared shortly.

These changes include the departure of Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge. We thank Roger for his leadership of the newsroom and contributions during our transition to an independent organization, and we wish him well. This is a difficult and emotional day for all of us. We are losing colleagues who reported, edited, and produced vital journalism and have done incredible work to bring important stories to life. We are grateful for all their contributions.

There will be plenty of time in the coming weeks to talk about The Intercept's future, and how we can work together to become financially sustainable while continuing to produce impactful journalism. Today, we are focused on supporting our colleagues.

Thank you

• rest of the message is cut off -

Some highlights for me:

Proton is not a product of Silicon Valley but a crowdfunded project conceived at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Proton was not created to get rich (if you want to get rich, you don’t go to work at CERN) but rather to address the important societal problem of surveillance capitalism.

From the start, Proton has always been about the mission and putting people ahead of profits. The goal is not to raise endless rounds of VC funding at dizzying valuations, and there is no price at which we would compromise our integrity.

Proton is a very rare tech company that has managed to achieve scale but today does not have any venture capital investors. This gives us an unparalleled ability to put user interests first without being beholden to financially driven investors. We cannot be forced to sell ourselves, forced to deliver higher profits, or forced to seek sources of revenue that don’t align with our mission.

Proton is not profit-driven, and we are strong believers in long-term financial sustainability. We are not billionaire subsidized, government subsidized, or donation subsidized. Rather, we derive almost all of our revenues from selling services directly to users in a profitable way.

We charge a fair price that reflects our costs and can deliver long-term stability. The benefit of this should not be overlooked in an era where software companies are raising prices 20% year over year. Proton’s prices have not increased in 10 years. And when our costs go down, because we don’t have VC shareholders with specific financial requirements, we can actually pass those savings on to you.

Technological sustainability cannot be overlooked. Proton owns all our servers and network equipment, acts as our own internet service provider, and doesn’t rely upon any third-party cloud providers (no Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.). Our data centers are located in multiple countries (Switzerland, Germany, and Norway), our server hardware is provided by multiple suppliers, as is the electricity that runs into our data centers, with the goal of eliminating all single points of external dependency. The investments required to take this approach are massive, but they ensure we are protected against third-party risks. AWS suddenly raising prices won’t tank our sustainable business model because we are in much better control over our direct costs.

The same goes for core technology and expertise. We maintain our own encryption libraries, employ our own cryptographers, and build and maintain our entire stack in-house, from the physical hardware all the way to the front-end software. This comes at much higher cost, but allows us to better react to any unexpected situations. There is very little software (or hardware) run at Proton today where we do not have our own in-house experts who can fix it if something goes wrong.

Goddamn did I not expect that. So many moments I was literally laughing. Like, actually. Not a huff of air from my nose. Or a recognition of “oh yeah, that was a joke. Good job, funny man.” Like, actually had to stop cooking and set down the knife and laugh.

Or maybe they’ll believe it when Israel says the “dogs the Hamas operatives.”

Link - https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1757408245944111301