James Rosen-Birch ⚖️🕊️ Profile picture
Aug 10 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
July 6 UNOSAT data of Gaza City; every red dot is a building damaged or destroyed by Israel

there is a bright red dot off-centre in the circled area

that is the location of al-Tabi'in school

as you can see, it was one of the few standing buildings in a heavily-damaged area Image
here's the zoomed-out map showing everywhere in the Strip that has been bombed as of July 6. Image
when you overlay damaged agricultural land, the dearth of spaces untouched by the Israeli military becomes abundantly clear Image
the map of damaged agricultural land is so clearly now *all agricultural land* (again, UN/FAO satellite data) that you can literally use it to see the outline of cities Image
here's another simplified map.

only two layers, none of them geographic:
- damaged agricultural land (UN/FAO satellite data)
- damaged structures (UNOSAT satellite data) Image
@silenceonthelam link:
unosat.org/static/unosat_…

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More from @provisionalidea

Jul 31
Ismail Haniyeh lived in Qatar and was principally responsible for hostage negotiations with Israel

He was the head of the political bureau of Hamas — not its military wing

His assassination by Israel serves to kill the negotiations and score a PR win to defuse domestic tension
Haniyeh’s death has negative bearing on the war goals: organizing a hostage release will now be far more difficult, which is what Israeli leaders want

but his prominence allows Israelis to feel like they’ve scored a “win” against Hamas

so they can comfortably pivot to Lebanon
the lack of clear military objectives in Gaza, paired with an amorphous ambition to “destroy Hamas” has resulted in declining morale and a clear need for some sort of symbolic victory

particularly since it came out that Israel flooding Hamas’ tunnels was defeated by…drains
Read 6 tweets
Jun 21
One of the more common replies is that Israel is a decolonized state — not a settler-colonial one.

I am never sure to what degree to engage, since the originators only care inasmuch as “colonizer bad, Israel not bad, therefore Israel not colonizer”

but for those curious…
Early Zionists like Herzl were explicitly inspired by 19th century European nationalist and colonial movements. They saw — and frequently spoke of — Arabs as backwards savages who would benefit from the “civilizing force” of European Jews. (something echoed to a degree today)
Image
Israel’s metropole was, of course, Britain — the empire that controlled Mandatory Palestine and assigned it to the Zionists.

Fighting a war of independence, as many settler-colonial states have done (eg USA, South Africa), does not magically make Israel de- or anticolonial.
Read 10 tweets
Jun 20
Contemporary Israel ultimately makes a lot more sense when you see it as a 19th Century colonial movement that got its legs a hundred years too late, only to find itself in a world where colonialism was no longer in vogue

Hence the, “you got to do it, why can’t we?” claims now
There’s a certain set of Revisionist Zionists who see the Trail of Tears and other atrocities America conducted against its indigenous peoples until they were no longer a sizable enough population to resist

and considers it unfair they are not allowed to do the same today
What they don’t realize — or refuse to accept — is that the change did not come from Western morality shifting, but because decolonization happened and subaltern peoples become a lot more effective at mounting resistance against industrial metropoles.

It’s not “unfair”.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 13, 2023
I think one thing folks miss about the Apple sustainability spot

is that Tim Cook is an industrial engineer and supply chain specialist

and the spot is more about showing other mfgs that aggressive targets are not only attainable, but are now baseline

it is not entertainment
if you’re an Apple superfan or heavily steeped in tech, it’s easy to forget that Apple events are *industry events*

and the target audience, by order of importance is:

1) Apple investors
2) Apple employees
3) members of the Apple supply chain
4) competitors
5) everyone else
they tried to make it not boring, but the fact is

members of the supply chain now know the new expectations in terms of materials and emissions

and other bigcos will be grilled by investors on their comparatively milquetoast commitments at the next quarterly and annual meetings
Read 5 tweets
Feb 19, 2023
sometimes I pull statistics for fun just to keep my mental models up-to-date

it's easy to get lost in a bubble and forget what most of the world is like
I've been reading a lot of old Neurath for work, and it really strikes me as a failure of modern journalism that so much fundamental information about the world is collected but largely unknown

we pile story upon story but provide no context for people to anchor around
for all the talk of "data journalism", we've practically regressed since the days of Rudolf Modley's Telefacts in newspapers through the 1940s.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 28, 2022
I've been finding the "we have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips" take increasingly anemic lately.

We have a very narrow subset of human knowledge recorded and digitally accessible. And a lot of opinions and marketing material. So much else is routinely lost.
Every time a team collapses, a company folds, or a person passes, knowledge is lost. And not easily-recorded knowledge, either!

Specific, embodied knowledge of how a thing works "in the real world", stored experientially in the liminal space between individuals.
Even the law recognizes the sacred status of this knowledge. "Trade secrets": the things you learn on the job that set you apart, but aren't necessarily recorded anywhere. That perfect workflow; how to get a machine to work *just right*, the "secret sauce" in a recipe.
Read 4 tweets

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