Gillian Magee

Socialist, mother, fighter. unionist.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The US is a barbaric capitalist dystopia.

A court just ruled that people do NOT have a right to clean water, or to truthful information from the government.

This came after the city of Jackson, Mississippi misled residents into drinking what it knew was lead-contaminated water.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En uno de los funerales con más víctimas infantiles de la historia, hoy en Gaza enterraron a 70 niños, todos asesinados por "Israel", que les lanzó bombas de 1 tonelada de explosivos en sus casas del barrio de Al-Zaytoun de la ciudad de Gaza.

Quieren que pasemos página ante esta barbarie, quieren que simulemos que no ha pasado nada... no, nunca lo vamos a hacer, hasta el último latido, hasta la última bocanada de oxígeno, estaremos del lado del pueblo palestino.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

An awake working class is the only thing that has ever genuinely threatened concentrated power.

Not elections, which are managed.

Not journalism, which is owned.

Not protest, which is tolerated at the level where it's symbolic and suppressed at the level where it isn't.

A working class that understands, clearly, collectively, across the lines of race and nationality and religion that were drawn specifically to divide it, what is actually happening and who is actually responsible.

That is the threat.

That is why so much energy goes into making sure it doesn't happen.

The racism isn't incidental to the economic project.

The xenophobia isn't a distraction from the real politics.

The division is the politics.

Keep them fighting each other and they never look up.

Keep them looking at the border and they never read the trade agreement.

Keep them afraid of each other and they never ask who benefits from the fear.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You want to know what actual toughness looks like?

It looks like a Vietnamese woman in a tunnel, three meters underground, while B-52s try to collapse the earth above her, continuing to work.

It looks like a Cuban doctor going to West Africa during an Ebola outbreak when Western governments were still arguing about who should go.

It looks like a Chilean socialist, Salvador Allende, broadcasting on the radio as the coup closes in, telling his people that he will not resign, that he will not flee, that history is on their side, and then dying at his post.

It looks like the people of Gaza continuing to document their own deaths so the world cannot say it did not know.

It does not look like a man in a bunker giving the order for an airstrike on people who cannot reach him.

It does not look like a government that tortures prisoners and then classifies the evidence.

It does not look like an empire that can destroy a country from 30,000 feet and calls the distance from the consequences "strategic."

The people with the most weapons in the room are almost never the toughest people in the room.

The toughest people in the room are almost always the ones who had no weapons and remained standing anyway.

History is extremely consistent on this point.

[Kyle Church @KyleDChurch]

Reporters owe it to the NZ public to stop using euphemisms like "unusual" or adding 'humanising' details to soften what these public figures are doing - associating with extremists and calling their political opponents "barely human". This is very clearly fascist behaviour.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

This British A400M military transport plane departed at 6.15am from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus yesterday

15 minutes later it turned in direction of Tel Aviv - then quickly turned off its transponder

Its transponder was turned back on 1 hour and 15 minutes later coming from direction of Tel Aviv

New PM Andy Burnham sent an A400M to Tel Aviv last week ostensibly to "resupply embassy staff" in Israel. Mainstream media enforced a total blackout of the information

The A400M can carry a payload of 81,600 lbs or 116 fully equipped soldiers

It's unusual for a military transport plane to turn off its transponder in order to cover up its flight path — this is typically done by spy planes, drones, and fighter jets

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

Rumors are circulating in New York that Nickolay Mladenov, a loyal senior apparatchik in Trump’s criminal “Board of Peace,” is being considered as a compromise candidate for UN Secretary-General, as P5 states have been unable to agree on any of the current candidates. Such an appointment would cement control of the UN by the US-Israel Axis, further buttress impunity for their crimes, shelve the organization’s legal norms and standards in favor of raw state power, and significantly expedite the slide of the UN into oblivion. This is an existential moment for the UN. Either it will defend international law in opposition to the ravages of empire, or it will become a mere extension of that empire, at which point it could best advance peace, human rights, and development by dismantling itself.

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

THE BIGGEST COUNTRIES in the world yesterday stood up for Iran and for the people of Palestine.

The attack on Iran is illegal, they declared. And Palestinians need justice.

But western mainstream media outlets ran an astonishing news blackout on the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with most outlets giving it zero coverage.

.

ATTACK VIOLATES INTERNATIONAL LAW
Leaders of China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Iran and other countries declared that the US attacks on Iran “violate the UN Charter and the principles and norms of international law, posing a serious risk to world peace, security, and stability”.

The lack of coverage from most western mainstream media outlets is bizarre.

The SCO is more than three times the size of NATO.

The pro-peace Eastern organization covers 42.5 per cent of humanity, compared to NATO’s 13 per cent.

.

MODI SIGNED
While China is seen as the de facto leader of the organization, much of the attention was on India’s Narendra Modi, who has been cozying up to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu

And Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has also been trying to play both sides.

But both turned up and signed the declaration.

.

MOURNING THE DEAD
Leaders at the huge gathering of nations also used the opportunity to condemn the murder of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and his family by the United States and Israel.

In an unprovoked attack on 28 February this year, they killed 40 people, including the leader’s granddaughter Zahra, aged 14 months. Other victims, the same day, included 120 children at a primary school.

.

NO MILITARY ANGLE
Participants also reminded the world of the difference in character between itself and NATO.

NATO focuses on diverting public cash to weapons and the military.

SCO is non-military, and promotes friendly relations between countries through mutually beneficial trade and shared pro-peace policies.
.
.

[Rafael Correa @MashiRafael]

🇪🇨🇪🇨🇪🇨DIFINDE‼️
Ecuador, Latinoamérica, Mundo:
Asesinaron a René Cobos, el periodista independiente que ayudó a hacer el reportaje de la BBC sobre crimen organizado en Ecuador.
¿Cómo una noticia así no es escándalo mundial?
¿Qué nos pasa?
#NosGobiernanDelincuentes

[Sahel Revolutionary Soldier @beyondB_DAG]

Macron says: « We are planning a meeting
here in France 🇨🇵 and we will invite all African leaders so that we can discuss Africa's economic prosperity

Captain IBRAHIM TRAORÉ RESPONDS:

« So you're not African, but you're planning a meeting to discuss African issues outside of Africa while inviting African leaders to travel outside of Africa to attend an African summit chaired by a non-African outside of Africa? Well, count me out of participating. »

The true definition of an african leader that possesses dignity and self esteem.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let's discuss what happened after Vietnam won, because the empire's reaction tells you exactly who they are.

Did they accept the result? Did they recognize the new government? Did they offer reparations for the millions killed, the land poisoned, the infrastructure destroyed?

No.

They imposed a trade embargo on Vietnam that lasted nearly twenty years.

A country that had just survived the most intense bombing campaign in human history, a country trying to rebuild from rubble, a country with millions of its people dead or displaced or disabled by American chemical weapons, that country was then economically strangled for two more decades as punishment for winning.

Punishment. For winning. A war they started.

Think about the psychology of that. Think about what that tells you about how they view the world.

The beating wasn't enough. The losing wasn't enough.

Even after the troops came home and the war was over, the empire needed to keep hurting Vietnam because the alternative, accepting that a small, poor, formerly colonized country had the right to exist on its own terms, was too psychologically intolerable to process.

They eventually normalized relations in 1995. Twenty years after the liberation of Saigon.

Two decades of additional economic punishment on top of three million dead and generations scarred by Agent Orange.

And then they wanted to talk about trade deals.

And then they wanted to talk about tourism.

And then they wanted to talk about strategic partnerships.

Vietnam said yes.

Not out of forgiveness necessarily.

Out of strategy.

Out of the same cold, clear-eyed pragmatism that won the war.

You use what's available. You don't let sentiment make your decisions.

That's a kind of strength the empire has never understood.

Because the empire runs on sentiment, specifically, the sentiment of its own importance.

Vietnam has never had that luxury.

And that's precisely why Vietnam won.

[Mick Wallace @wallacemick]

The Lawless US Regime continues to commit War Crimes as it attacks Iran again tonight. The Europeans who say they care about International Law + Human Rights are silent. Worse, they are complicit in the endless acts of US Terrorism...
#TorinoMonza

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

Ecuador under US imperial rule has become a failed state run by drug cartels.

The Ecuadorian journalist who helped expose how police are working closely with organized crime has just been murdered.

Any Ecuadorian journalist who exposes the crimes of the drug-trafficking oligarch family of the country's right-wing narco-dictator Daniel Noboa (a US citizen and close Trump ally) is killed.

Any Ecuadorian journalist who investigates the Noboa narco-regime's collaboration with the US military is killed.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who’ve fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy.

Survivorship bias is when your analysis focuses on those who made it while ignoring those who didn’t. You got a decent job, bought a house, and are now living comfortably, which means the system works fine and there must be something wrong with anyone who can’t thrive under it.

All the people who work just as hard as you do but still find themselves struggling go completely missing from your perspective. All the people who are just as clever and resourceful as you but haven’t found financial stability are conveniently overlooked. Everyone whose business venture failed instead of thriving, everyone who got laid off instead of promoted, everyone whose family circumstances were less fortunate than yours, everyone who has a race, gender, disability, or socioeconomic situation which makes their life harder than your own, simply doesn’t factor into your understanding of the way things work.

You got lucky, and you can point to other people who got lucky, and you use those examples to hide from the inconvenient reality that it could just as easily have been you who got the shit end of the capitalism stick. You see a guy out your window sleeping on the sidewalk and you tell yourself there’s a perfectly good reason why you’re in here while they’re out there, and in order to make that cognitive tango work inside your head you have to tell yourself a fairy tale.

That’s where the just-world fallacy comes in. The just-world fallacy is a cognitive bias which assumes that everyone gets what they deserve: that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

The appeal of this fallacy is that it gives us a sense of control. It allows us to believe that nothing bad will happen to us if we just do the right thing and avoid making stupid mistakes. It also allows us to believe that we deserve all the good fortune life has brought us, and that the poor exist because they’re not as virtuous and wise as we are.

The trouble with the just-world fallacy is that it only works if you don’t think about it too hard. Anyone who’s been alive for a few years knows that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. We’ve all seen it countless times, with people we know personally. The world simply is not fair. If you are doing well under the current system, it’s only because your luck has held out. You have what you have because of sheer dumb luck.

If you can get real with yourself about this, you will understand why the system needs to change. A system which insists upon maintaining a very large tier of society who must stress and struggle throughout their lives is not a just or moral system. It cannot be defended by anyone with a rational mind and a well-formed conscience.

People who oppose the movement toward a more equitable society often accuse socialists of “jealousy” and “greed”, but that’s just projection; it is their own greed and selfishness which prevents them from sincerely reckoning with the unjust nature of the society they coincidentally wound up on top of. It is true that those who support socialism are frequently less economically privileged than the average capitalism proponent, but that’s only because they have a reality-based perspective on the abusive nature of the capitalist status quo.

Those who have been fortunate under capitalism often have a harder time forming a reality-based understanding of the system they live under, because they have to fight their way through all the comfortable cognitive biases which insist that everything’s more or less fine the way it is. If they still insist that capitalism is great, it’s only because their own intellectual laziness, ego, and moral cowardice have prevented them from getting real about their circumstances.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Hồ Chí Minh quoted the American Declaration of Independence at the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945.

Word for word.

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

He wasn't being clever. He wasn't being sarcastic.

He believed that America, having fought its own colonial power, would understand what Vietnam was trying to do.

He wrote letters to Harry Truman. Multiple letters.

Asking for support. Or at minimum, asking to be left alone.

Truman never responded. Not once.

Instead, the United States funded France's attempt to re-colonize Vietnam to the tune of 80% of the war's cost.

They paid the French to keep Vietnamese people enslaved because they were more afraid of Vietnamese independence than they were committed to the principles written in their own founding documents.

When France lost at Điện Biên Phủ, humiliated, hollowed out, crawling home, America stepped in directly.

Because the lesson had to be delivered.

Because a free Vietnam was too dangerous an idea to be allowed to exist.

So they took a man who quoted Jefferson and answered his plea for independence with twenty years of war.

Jefferson survived.

Hồ Chí Minh survived.

Vietnam survived.

And the country that wrote "all men are created equal" spent those twenty years proving it didn't believe a word of it.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

can't wait to watch this by the amazing Samah Sabawi

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

In case anyone had any remaining illusions the UK is a democracy.
It is a zionist highly authoritarian state.

[Ami Dar @AmiDar]

This piece by the great Amira Hass, published in Haaretz today, is too urgent and important to be behind a paywall, so I've copied the whole thing here. Please read and share.

* * * * * * *

Israel Isn't Debating a Palestinian State. It's Preparing for Expulsion.

Gadi Eisenkot's position on Palestinian statehood is beside the point. Across Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself, the machinery for making Palestinian life impossible is already operating, laying the groundwork for mass expulsion

Gadi Eisenkot, the election frontrunner and leader of the Yashar party, has a stance on a Palestinian state that is ultimately irrelevant. What is at stake today is not a "diplomatic solution," but the very existence of the Palestinian people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Israeli forces striving to "erase" them recognize no limits or restraints. Their supporters are too numerous for us to rely solely on the steadfastness and resilience of a people that has already endured expulsion plans carried out by Israel.

The world stands by. The left is tiny, weak and hoarse from sounding too many warnings. The anti-Bibi opposition oscillates among downplaying the danger, remaining indifferent to it and outright supporting expulsion. The sporadic condemnations, prompted mainly by something the U.S. ambassador posted on X, are about as useful as a sieve in a rainstorm. The Jewish Phalangists attack constantly and everywhere, not only in Qusra.

The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.

"Erasure" is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians' declarations, military orders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this "solution" diligently and without fear of international condemnation.

Israeli policy is directed toward making life unbearable for Palestinians wherever they live, so that their emigration can be described as an act of free will. Within Israel itself, the authorities give Arab crime organizations free rein to arm themselves and kill Palestinian citizens in their homes. In the West Bank, those same Israeli authorities give "God's battalions" free rein to arm themselves, kill and expel, while the official army continues its raids day and night. In devastated and thirsty Gaza, the government and the army cultivate armed militias of criminal collaborators, while Israeli pilots continue to launch missiles of revenge and retribution that claim the lives of still more children. All these testosterone-fueled displays are interconnected.

At the same time, Israel is destroying or severely restricting Palestinians' ability to earn a living. In Gaza, that mission has been completed. A "living dead" population of aid recipients, two million people carrying the weight of some 74,000 fresh graves, families and memories, talents and professions, and evaporated savings, is crammed into roughly 150 square kilometers of scorched earth. Creativity, resourcefulness and mutual aid are dwarfed by the scale of the destruction and by Israel's prohibition on rebuilding and recovery.

In the West Bank, the Finance Ministry's financial noose is tightening around the necks of approximately three million people and the Palestinian Authority. The systematic theft of revenues is compounded by the army's campaigns of destruction in cities and refugee camps, as well as by the other methods used to prevent Palestinians from cultivating and developing their land: checkpoints, bureaucratic prohibitions, fences and Israeli-Jewish shepherds.

Within Israel itself, the "Judaization of the Galilee and Negev" was and remains code for stealing land and resources from Palestinian citizens of Israel. Discrimination against them in allocations, subsidies and employment, along with building prohibitions and demolitions, has always featured prominently in official policy within the Green Line.

Let me reiterate: The very existence of the Palestinian people between the sea and the river is now in danger. Too many active forces are creating that danger: Israel's military might and capabilities; the cult of military service under all conditions and under every government; obedience as a value; weapons and military attacks as the default modus operandi; the normalization of PTSD among soldiers and of soldiers dying by suicide; the attractions of a military career and the doors it opens; the lure of an affordable villa in a Galilee exclusionary community or a settler suburb in Samaria; the falsehoods of official and unofficial propaganda; indifference to the hell on earth Israel has created in the Gaza Strip; denial of 60 years of occupation and forced rule; the Pavlovian response, "But October 7"; the synergy among the army, the government, the rabbis and the kippa-wearing militias in the West Bank; equanimity in the face of Lebanon's destruction; disregard for the occupation of more parts of Syria; the normalization of expulsion discourse; justice and education systems tainted by secular and religious racism; and the army of jailers who abuse thousands of Palestinian prisoners, both under orders and by choice.

Together, these and similar forces are creating the material, ideological and psychological infrastructure within Israeli-Jewish society for another mass expulsion of Palestinians and for what might accompany it: mass slaughter.

The heroes of the settler militias openly declare that expulsion is their goal. They clearly recognize the readiness of large segments of Israeli-Jewish society to participate in carrying it out, actively or passively, directly or indirectly. Through their daily provocations and crimes, committed in broad daylight and made possible only by institutional support, the Phalangists constantly seek to provoke a Palestinian act of rage and revenge that "succeeds," so that it can be exploited as the match that ignites a new holy war.

The Jewish Phalangists and the right-wing organizations that fuel them are counting on broad mobilization, including from the leaders, voters and supporters of Yashar and the liberal Democrats party, for a war that could already be given the slogan: "One people, one army, one land cleansed of Arabs."

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The Irish famine was not caused by a potato blight. It was caused by a law passed in 1663, and the blight simply arrived to collect.

Ships left Cork the whole time it was happening, carrying butter and bacon under armed guard, past people dying on the quayside.

The version taught in schools is a fungus. Blight arrives, potatoes rot, tragedy. It leaves out why eight and a half million people were standing on one South American tuber to begin with, and that part is not weather. It has dates and it has signatures.

Ireland had cattle before it had writing. The national epic is a war over a stolen bull. Wealth was counted in cows, rank was counted in cows, and for a thousand years the country ran on beef, milk and butter.

Then in 1663 the English parliament taxed Irish cattle out of the English market, and in 1666 banned them outright, in an act that called the importing of them a common nuisance. Ireland was pushed into salt beef, hides and butter for the navy, the colonies and the slave plantations. Produced on Irish land, sold out of Irish ports, eaten somewhere else. The good ground was reorganised around what would survive a sea voyage.

What was left for the people was the crop that feeds a family off a quarter of an acre of bad land. That is not a folk tradition. That is what you are reduced to when the field behind your house is producing somebody else's dinner.

In 1845 the crop failed and the food kept leaving.

Butter, bacon, ham and live cattle going out of Cork and Limerick and Waterford while the workhouses filled. The relief that existed came with the Gregory Clause: hold more than a quarter acre of land and you were entitled to nothing. Give up the ground or starve on it. Somebody sat down and drafted that.

A million dead. A million gone. Eight and a half million down to six and a half in six years, and Ireland is the only country in Europe with fewer people in it now than in 1840.

The lesson everyone takes is about the fragility of monocultures, which is a comfortable lesson, because it blames a plant.

Nobody starves for want of food in a country that is exporting it. They starve because two centuries of decisions, taken by men who were never going to be hungry, left them one thing to eat and that thing could fail all at once.

Ireland's cattle are now the subject of national emissions targets, and the argument is once again about what that land ought to be producing, conducted by people who will not be eating the outcome either way.

The blight came in 1845. The reason it killed a million people was drafted in 1663.