daydreamer's escapism
you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
  • ⚡️🇪🇬 Vodafone in Egypt states that it will install cell towers in Rafah, Egypt, to allow Palestinians in Gaza to continue their coverage and document the atrocities that is ongoing as of now.  Work should start tomorrow.  — Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) October 28, 2023ALT
  • Israel has started putting out loads of "evidence" that the Hamas headquarters are below the Al-Shifa hospital.

    Their "evidence" is a CGI video that they made themselves showing the whole hospital and then zooming in and going below ground to show a sprawling, multi-level "headquarters" with little CGI-people with guns roaming around on metal platforms and such. Here's the link to Netan-fuck-you's twitter, and the video. 50/50 odds on it vanishing within 24 hours, so if anyone wants to embed the video into a reblog of this post in order to preserve it in all its bullshit glory, please do.

    Their second piece of evidence is a phone call recording where the two people are "overheard" saying THEE most obvious script I've ever heard in my life, which basically amounts to "Well you know how the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "The headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "Yeah, the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital." It's literally that badly done. I can't now find the video of it, but if someone has it, pls link it. The version I saw was shared by SkyNews (🤮)

    Make no mistake. This is israel getting ahead of the global narrative. This is Israel justifying their bombing of a hospital before they do it.

    They bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, and the world responded with an enormous wave of outrage and recriminations, so Israel immediately tried to claim that Hamas did it, and then they said that actually no, it was Palestinian Jihadists (who don't even operate out of Gaza; they're all based in the West Bank).

    They know full well that if they bombed another hospital, they wouldn't be able to claim it was Hamas/PJ.

    So now they're laying all this groundwork, disseminating blatantly falsified "evidence" of a sprawling secret terrorist bunker hidden beneath the main hospital in Gaza, where its estimated that 50,000 people are sheltering.

    Israel has succeeded in completely cutting off almost all of Gazas communications. Al Jazeera has managed to make contact with one correspondent they have on the ground via satellite connection, but their contact with him has been extremely spotty. People in Gaza cannot call emergency services or upload images/footage to twitter or anything. They are completely and utterly dark, and this is absolutely by design on Israel's part.

    If Al-Shifa hospital is still standing by this time tomorrow, I will be shocked.

    Israel is laying the groundwork now so that when they level the hospital and kill every single person inside it, the public will justify it for them. "Yeah but Hamas had a huge headquarters underneath," the public will say. "It's not Israel's fault that Hamas hiding underneath hospitals," they'll say. "Israel's just trying to root out Hamas! It's awful that so many civilians died, but that's what happens when terrorists use civilians as shields" they'll say, as though killing a human shield in order to get to the bad guy is acceptable literally anywhere in the world, much less when the "shields" amount to well over 7,000 civilians.

    Do not fall for the propaganda. Do not allow Israel to bomb another hospital without forcing them to fave the backlash for it (even if they didn't do Al-Ahli, they've attacked hospitals and health centres repeatedly in the past). Do not let your country's politicians justify the slaughter of a hospital full of civilians just to get at the (alleged!!) terrorist base below. Do not let your colleagues or friends or family justify the razing of a hospital full of innocent men, women, and children.

    We can't do much to stop them, but by fuck can we do everything in our power to make sure they don't get away with it.

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    [Image IDs: the first is a tweet by Netanyahu, saying Hamas-ISIS is sick. They turn hospitals into headquarters for their terror. We just released intelligence proving it." This is followed by a video, which the at the time of the screenshot was showing a CGI version of the hospital. Image 2 is the same, but the video was screenshotted as it shows the CGI "lair" of hamas that's allegedly below the hospital; a multi-storey industrial-looking space with armed soldiers walking along suspended platforms. Image three is a tweet by @HenMazzig that says "BREAKING: it's now confirmed that Hamas's operational headquarters is stationed below the Al Shifa hospital - Gaza's main hospital." This is followed by an image screenshotted from Netanyahu's bullshit video, this time showing an aerial shot of the hospital amidst the debris of the almost completely destroyed neighbouring suburb.]

    I accidentally hit the poll button and now it won't let me get rid of it or publish this post until I've filled it in, so: is bombing a hospital utterly reprehensible, unforgivable, and unjustifiable?

    yes

    yes

  • Hey guys, there are eleven votes on the poll, but only two reblogs thus far. With tmblr actively suppressing any posts that have to do with the situation in Gaza, reblogs are imperative; it's the only way to spread word, since the main tags are all being hobbled. Please reblog this. 50,000 civilians sheltering at the hospital, and Israel is almost certainly gonna bomb it - if they haven't already - and they're gonna claim it was justified.

    Please help fight that narrative, and reblog this.

  • what the actual fuck????

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  • If you are unable to afford donating, this link allows you to click a button every 24 hours in order help donate to Palestine.

    American mutuals, I seriously urge you to tell Congress and Biden to stand with Palestine, and do not stop sending this message. You can also donate here.

    This is not a war; what Israel is doing to Palestine is genocide. Do not sit idly by and do not stay quiet. Now more than ever is the most important time to not look away.

  • guy with a degradation kink x guy who just hates him

  • prev tags system is still in place you just have to copy the tags first and then credit them. proper citation practices are important you quote your sources you don't just go say "tboydracula agrees with me" and then force your readers to go find the actual statement

  • New anti-AI tool from the team developing Glaze that looks to poison prompts and ruin data sets entirely.

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    The tool can go so far as to trick AI into generating things it didn't ask for. 50 "poisoned" images of dogs into a data set yield typical errors companies have been working to get rid of: weird proportions, extra limbs, etc. When they added 300 samples, it was drastic enough to make a data set that was trained to generate "dogs" into "cats" making the tool basically useless.

    It's not out yet, but they're adding it to Glaze and they intend on making it open source.

    Welcome to the age of the AI arms race.

  • New Potion just dropped to poison your enemies

  • Love it. Thanks for posting OP!!!

    More details:

    A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

    The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth...

    The team intends to integrate Nightshade into Glaze, and artists can choose whether they want to use the data-poisoning tool or not. The team is also making Nightshade open source, which would allow others to tinker with it and make their own versions. The more people use it and make their own versions of it, the more powerful the tool becomes, Zhao says. The data sets for large AI models can consist of billions of images, so the more poisoned images can be scraped into the model, the more damage the technique will cause...

    Generative AI models are excellent at making connections between words, which helps the poison spread. Nightshade infects not only the word “dog” but all similar concepts, such as “puppy,” “husky,” and “wolf.” The poison attack also works on tangentially related images. For example, if the model scraped a poisoned image for the prompt “fantasy art,” the prompts “dragon” and “a castle in The Lord of the Rings” would similarly be manipulated into something else...

    The research shows that vulnerabilities “don’t magically go away for these new [AI] models, and in fact only become more serious,” Kamath says. “This is especially true as these models become more powerful and people place more trust in them, since the stakes only rise over time.” 

    -via MIT Technology Review, October 23, 2023

  • a few days ago an irl told me about how the alphabet is on the wrong order on the doctor who wiki because in one episode a character recites the alphabet backwards but gets two letters the wrong way around and there has been no other representation of the full alphabet in any other dw media so technically there’s no proof that it isn’t canon and i’ve been thinking about that ever since

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    not joking (U is supposed to come before V)

  • actually it gets funnier. there are multiple instances of parts of the alphabet being spoken in episodes. the problem is absolutely none of these have spoken that specific section since the episode that got the order wrong.

  • eduardo galeano in 2009

    (This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by Latin American dictatorships that Israel supported)

  • "Since 1948 Palestinians have lived in perpetual humiliation. They can't breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, their everything.

    They don't even have the right to elect their own leaders: when they vote for someone they aren't supposed to vote for, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It has been transformed into a rat's nest without an exit since Hamas fairly won the 2006 elections. Something similar occurred in 1932 when the Communist Party won in El Salvador. Drenched in blood, Salvadoreans paid for their misbehaviour and since that time have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury that not all peoples deserve.

    There is no war of aggression that doesn't claim to be a defensive war. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland from invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to keep Iraq from invading the world. In each of its defensive wars, Israel swallows up another piece of Palestine and the snacking continues.

    Israel is the country that has never complied with UN resolutions or recommendations, never abides by judgements of international courts and mocks international law. It is also the only country that has legalized the torture of prisoners.

    Who is granting them the impunity with which they are carrying out the slaughter of Gaza? The Spanish government couldn't bomb the Basque region to wipe out ETA, or Britain invade Ireland to liquidate the IRA, with impunity. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust introduced a policy of eternal impunity? Or is it the all-powerful US that gave the green light and has in Israel the most unfailing of vassals.

    ‘These Palestinians are dangerous people’ is the message rained down by the other parallel bombardment, by the mass media of manipulation, which would have us believe that one Israeli life is worth that of one hundred Palestinians. These media would also have us believe that Israel’s 200 atomic bombs are humanitarian and that it was a nuclear power named Iran that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Does the so-called 'international community' exist?

    And if so is it anything more than merchants, bankers and warriors? Is it anything more than an artistic name the US uses on the world stage?

    In the face of the tragedy of Gaza world hypocrisy shines once again. As usual, indifference, empty speeches, vapid declarations, high-sounding rhetoric, ambiguous positions pay tribute to sacred impunity.

    In the face of the tragedy of Gaza the Arab countries wash their hands – as usual. And as usual the European countries wring their hands.

    Old Europe, with such a gift for beauty and perversity, weeps one tear after another, while secretly celebrating this masterful game. Because hunting Jews was always a European custom, though for half a century now the Palestinians have been paying the price for this historic crime. The Palestinians, who are also Semites but who were never, and are not, anti-semitic, are paying in their own blood and money some else's debt."

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    my timeline is full of tweets like this. i’m going to throw up

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  • i know the nyt regularly edits and rewrites headlines post-publication but it's kind of wild that the basically one (1) good op-ed i've seen them publish in ages that was getting really widely shared was renamed from "Why Must Palestinians Audition For Your Empathy?" to much more vague and defanged "The Palestine Double Standard." like. come on.

    anyways.

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    (link to the archived page with the original headline)

    The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.

    In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.

    If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts”? When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?

    It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.

    Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ].Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.

    This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember?That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.

    Here’s another thing I know as a writer and psychologist: It matters where you start a narrative. In addiction work, you call this playing the tape. Diasporically or not, being Palestinian is the quintessential disrupter: It messes with a curated, modified tape. We exist, and our existence presents an existential affront. As long as we exist, we challenge several falsehoods, not the least of which is that, for some, we never existed at all. That decades ago, a country was born in the delicious, glittering expanse of nothingness — a birthright, something due. Our very existence challenges a formidable, militarized narrative.

    But the days of the Palestine exception are numbered. Palestine is increasingly becoming the litmus test for true liberatory practice.

    In the meantime, Palestinians continue to be cast paradoxically — both terror and invisible, both people who never existed and people who cannot return.

    Imagine being such a pest, such an obstacle. Or: Imagine being so powerful.

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    also some other notable changes in recent headlines…

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  • "what about gay rights in palestine" "what about womens rights in palestine" idk maybe they can work on that once they get Being Alive In Their Homes Rights

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