harry smith

UL Grad // 23 // Arsenal // Munster // Celtics

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Westerners love to whine about how tyrannical and authoritarian Iran's government is, but it's worth noting that the control Tehran exerts within its borders is a major reason US-Israeli efforts to turn the nation into a giant Libya have failed. That control exists to thwart precisely the type of existential foreign threat that Iran just thwarted. Were it not for that existential foreign threat, such control wouldn't be necessary.

The US has openly admitted to deliberately fomenting the domestic unrest we saw in Iran earlier this year, and to attempting to arm insurgent factions. Those foreign threats were put down by precisely the "tyranny" you've seen western liberals and anarkiddies decrying in Iran all year.

The fact that the US-Israeli war failed to achieve the government-toppling goals set out by Washington and Tel Aviv means that Iran was able to inhibit the visibility that US and Israeli intelligence agencies had into the nation, because you only fail to accomplish a military objective you think you can accomplish if your enemy is able to surprise you. Countering US and Israeli intelligence operations, rooting out US and Israeli intelligence assets, blocking US and Israeli propaganda from domestic consumption, and obstructing US and Israeli visibility into Tehran's government and military could only be achieved by a strong government that's willing exert forceful control over what goes on inside its own borders.

Westerners like to point at the "authoritarianism" of the few remaining enemies of the US-centralized empire as though it proves that we're looking at a struggle between a beneficent and virtuous civilization and a bunch of evil tyrants, but really all it proves is that the only nations who are able to resist absorption into the imperial blob are the ones who are willing and able to exert control over what happens inside their borders. If the US and its allies weren't constantly working to subvert and topple all unabsorbed nations, this "authoritarianism" wouldn't be needed to resist it.

[// @aggzzx]

Every World Cup game that kicks off late

[TJ @EliteFourDan]

Tell her Messi still doin it

[Cole Adams @coleadamss]

Going from MBappe to Haaland to Messi

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

Updated. Friends of Israel in the UK government:

CABINET
Prime Minister
Deputy Prime Minister
Chancellor
Foreign Secretary
Defence Secretary
Education Secretary
Business Secretary
Work & Pensions Secretary
Science Secretary
Treasury Secretary
N.Ireland Secretary
Chief Secretary

OTHER MINISTERS
Cabinet Minister
Foreign Minister
Home Office Minister
Housing Minister
Health Minister
Energy Minister
Business Minister
Transport Minister
Environment Minister
Culture Minister
Solicitor General

[Abdulruhman Ismail @a_abdulruhman]

They call Palestine Action terrorists because they touched the one thing Western states protect more fiercely than human life: the weapons machine.
History has seen this before.

In Ireland, the activists of Pitstop Ploughshares, known as the Shannon Five, disabled a US Navy plane before the Iraq War , and the jury understood the point: when the law protects war, conscience must interrupt it.
As a Palestinian, I know exactly what they interrupted.
They did not attack life.

They stood between life and the machine built to erase it.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

Hang on. People have been telling me all day that the only property for sale was 'behind the Green Line'/'within Israel's 1967 borders'. Are you saying that isn't true?

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Si hay que matar a la gente para poder gobernar, se hace, todas las muertes, asesinatos y secuestros que hagamos, debemos culpar a los comunistas. Hay que extirpar al cáncer de la izquierda de Latinoamérica, Israel nos apoya".

Juan Orlando Hernández, ex-presidente de Honduras títere de EEUU, un criminal indultado por Trump tras traficar con 400 toneladas de cocaína, habla en unos audios filtrados sobre el nuevo Plan Condor que EEUU e "Israel" están plantando en Latinoamérica, con elecciones amañadas y criminales fascistas títeres como él.

Nadie en la prensa monta ningún escándalo con Honduras, donde se han amañado elecciones y se han perpetrado secuestros y asesinatos, donde EEUU ha indultado a un criminal como Juan Orlando (al que Trump llamó un "buen hombre") y planean masacres si el pueblo se levanta.

[Josie Long @JosieLong]

Everybody was told in 2010-15 that austerity was painful but necessary to improve living standards. And then no improvements came, ever.

[Guilherme Azevedo @guiazevedo31]

É a Copa mais bizarra da história. Ou pelo menos da era moderna, com certeza.

Nem na ditadura catari foi feito isso. Nem na Rússia de Putin.

Mas vai ter gente querendo justificar o injustificável, passando pano. Só porque é nos Estados Unidos.

Fifa rendida ao dinheiro.

[Sean Padraig McCarthy @SeanMcCarthyCom]

Bloodsport with AI generated patriotism slop in between ads for insider trading platforms, beer, gambling, and drug money laundering crypto really was the appropriate celebration for the state of America at 250

[#WAKOFA 🇬🇭 @316simsim]

This is so sad man

[Puck @VRCPuck]

I need to be absolutely serious for once.

Never, EVER reply 'yes' or similar to tweets like this. In the UK you'll do 14 years in jail (not a joke). If you're abroad and visit, you'll be arrested at the airport.

Crazy that this tweet was made by a UK politician to trap people.

[Nahid @NahidPoureisa]

This is disgusting. How desperate Americans are. They are saying Iran’s national team captain doesnt have a visa anymore and it’s already expired because he entered the US and he can’t come back for the next match. And you already know why he has to come back? Because our team has to travel to Mexico every time and come back for the next match. Their hatred and deep fear toward Iran is making me proud.

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

The World Cup is exposing an uncomfortable truth about international relations: citizens of countries in the Global South face systemic discrimination in visa and immigration procedures.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

BREAKING: The Court of Appeal has backed the government's appeal against the High Court and reinstated the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

As I've been noting for some time, this was always going to happen.

The police ignored the High Court's ruling of proscription as unlawful and continued arresting people as terrorists for holding placards stating: "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action."

On Friday, Judge Johnson upgraded the criminal damage convictions of the Filton Four to terrorism offences in his sentencing, even though at the time of sentencing Palestine Action was not, in the eyes of the courts, considered a terrorist organisation.

It was as though the High Court decision never happened.

We have been subjected to legal threatre to make it look as if the judiciary have carefully weighed our most cherished and basic rights against the interests of the British state in continuing its complicity in the Gaza genocide.

This has all been a stitch-up to keep the focus on the faux-illegality of opposing a genocide rather than the very real illegality of the British state colluding in atrocities that have killed many tens of thousands – and more likely, hundreds of thousands – of civilians in Gaza.

Anyone who has supported this dangerous farce should hang their heads in shame.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

In upholding the proscription of Palestine Action, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr showed she was historically illiterate.

Contrary to her claims, the Sufragettes were neither a peaceful civil disobedience group nor did they operate "transparently in the open".

Their hundreds of bombing and arson attacks are known to have injured at least two dozen people, many of them postal workers, left with severe burns.

Their bomb and arson squads organised this violence through underground cells. Leaders were kept in a network of safe houses to avoid discovery by police. And leader Emmeline Pankhurst used body doubles and assumed names to evade police capture.

There's even a 2015 Hollywood movie, Sufragette, showing all this. This sudden level of ignorance by our political and judicial class is entirely manufactured.

The Sufragette movement was far, far more violent and clandestine than anything Palestine Action has been doing.

That's not an argument against the Suffragettes. It's argument exposing the utter hypocrisy of the politicians, judges and media peddling lies to justify crushing an organisation trying to expose UK government complicity in Israel's genocide.

[Aidan Regan @Aidan_Regan]

4,300 days in government and he's blaming the councils.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Palestine Action is in good company. British governments and courts criminalised resistance to slavery, the Chartist movement for universal male suffrage, any organising by trade unionists, and the Suffragette movement to win women the vote.

None of our rights were given to us by the ruling class. We had to fight for each of them tooth and nail.

The British establishment is always on the wrong side of history, because history is with the struggle of ordinary people, not with the selfish interests of the billionaires and war industries.

Those earlier struggles were deemed the terrorism of their day by the very same "liberals" – the British establishment and its useful idiots – who today declare any practical action to stop British complicity in Israel's genocide to be terrorism.

Note too as proof of bad faith: the British establishment is well advanced in its efforts to declare entirely peaceful protest – marches through the streets – as anti-social, hate crimes and soon enough terrorism too.

The ruling class consider attempts to stop a genocide, even holding a banner against the mass murder of children, to be far worse than racist pogroms in Belfast, which try to burn alive people in their homes because of the colour of their skin.