Josh Stride

#Seafood, #Oceans, #Environment, #HumanRights, #HumanTrafficking, #LabourRights, #SupplyChains. Society, media, food, politics. Anti-Imperialist Peacenik.

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

I wrote a #review of @Ehrlich1Judith's excellent #documentary @BoysWhoSaidNo for @Resurgence_mag, a film that demonstrates how principled #nonviolent #resistance & courage in the cause for #justice can ripple just as profoundly as violence or oppression https://t.co/iW9CF6oHVH

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@paulmasonnews Study says domestic, not military spending, fuels job growth
https://t.co/iciKzqZUWC

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@Woestijnboom @paulmasonnews It could have in fact been over in the first few months if NATO hadn't scuppered peace talks to pursue their interest of weakening Russia/turning Ukraine into a militarised vassal state

[Danny Haiphong @GeopoliticsDH]

Israel and Washington are parading out the son of the SHAH 🇮🇷 to call for regime change.

The Shah was a brutal dictator who killed tens of thousands of Iranians at the behest of US and UK oil interests.

Another L for the U.S. “rules based order”

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@ZacGoldsmith So nothing to do with the decades of crippling sanctions, continuous subversion and undermining of civil society or multiple coup attempts by the West? Just this one guy? I'm sure you know better, but it's almost worst that your ignorance is feigned

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@GeoTechJourney @paulmasonnews It's been done, but the results don't suit the likes of Mason and his buddies in the war economy

https://t.co/iciKzqZUWC

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@paulmasonnews Not as much as almost all other type of investment...

https://t.co/iciKzqZUWC

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@rshereme The decline of war?! Has he been living in a different century to the rest of us? Or do wars started/perpetuated/funded/instigated by the US/West/Israel not count? What a tool

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@grantshapps @POTUS @Keir_Starmer @thetimes I know you probably think you've got a place in a bunker, but you should know that everyone thinks you're unbearable & annoying & will close the door in your face, so you'll be in the same armageddon boat as the rest us. Probably best to pipe down, Michael

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@carlbildt @kielinstitute Is it? https://t.co/uPcKp45akc

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@carlbildt Didn't the MOD also say the Russians were running out of shells - when it was in fact NATO running out - and the ludicrous claim they don't have enough water? Why would you believe MOD about anything?

[Michael Tracey @mtracey]

Kamala Harris STILL has zero policy positions on her campaign website. I know: who ultimately cares that much about policy positions on politicians' websites. But the complete shunning of any *pretense* of a policy platform for voters to scrutinize is amazingly brazen

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

The wife of neocon pundit @MaxBoot has been indicted for allegedly acting as an agent of a foreign power.

To mark this news, here's a flashback to six years ago this month when @MaxBoot accused Stephen F. Cohen (RIP) of acting as an "apologist" for Russia:

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@AtlanticCouncil @prezidentpavel @FredKempe No, the war isn't about actual, tangible things like land or minerals, it's about abstract and subjective ideas like freedom and of course US hegemony (aka Rules based order).

[Stella Assange @Stella_Assange]

Julian is free!!!!

Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. tHANK YOU. THANK YOU.

Follow @WikiLeaks for more info soon…

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

According to Community Notes, NATO is a “defensive military alliance”. Oh boy, where do I even begin?

Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the US, has bombed more countries than any other nation in history, NATO itself has very aggressive track record. In 1999, NATO began its 78-day illegal bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, the first act of aggression against a sovereign state committed in Europe since the Second World War. Many civilian targets were hit, including 48 hospitals, 70 schools, 18 kindergartens and 35 churches. Overall, hundreds of civilians were killed, including 81 children. Since then, NATO has been involved in several other conflicts, most notably Afghanistan and Libya. None had anything to do with defending its members from external aggression; in all these cases, NATO was quite clearly the aggressor.

There’s also no evidence that NATO is providing “security” to Europe. On the contrary, NATO provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by aggressively expanding eastward, systematically ignoring Russia’s warnings over the years. This represented a gross violation of the principle that had inspired the entire European security architecture since the Seventies: the indivisibility of security — that is, the notion that the security of NATO states and the Soviet Union (subsequently Russia) was “inseparably linked to that of all the others”, and could not come at the expense of another state’s security.

In other words, NATO played a crucial role in unravelling Europe’s security architecture and creating the conditions for the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. How does this square with the notion that NATO is there to guarantee Europe’s peace and security — or that, today, it represents a “bulwark” against the very chaos that it helped create?

Equally fanciful is the notion that countries can simply opt out of NATO. Unicorn believers might want to read up on the history of Gladio and other NATO stay-behind organisations — secret paramilitary networks that throughout the Cold War were “involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime” in several Western European countries, as even a European Parliament report acknowledged. That is, false flags terrorist attacks that were then blamed mostly of far-left groups in order to delegitimise left-wing and socialist/communist parties that were hostile to NATO.

We have every reason to believe that these organisations still exist in one form or another. Just last month, the Slovak prime minister Robert Fico — a fierce critic of NATO and the European Union — barely survived an attempt on his life.

Maybe next time try to find a better source than Wikipedia, @CommunityNotes?

[Josh Stride @JoshJStride]

@radartabs @Mike_Fabricant 🤣🤣🤣 Beat me to it, and far better than I'd have managed. Kudos

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

The results of the European elections are likely to have a much more limited impact than people fear — or hope for. Here’s why (for dummies):

1️⃣ The most obvious fact: the liberal-centrist bloc — i.e., the von der Leyen “super grand coalition” comprising the centre-right EPP, centre-left SD&D and liberal ER — has retained a majority, pointing to the likelihood of a second term for the incumbent president of the European Commission. Brace yourself.

2️⃣ The bigger presence of right-populist parties inside the EP will certainly have an impact on the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration, but those parties are deeply divided on several crucial strategic issues: social and economic matters, European enlargement, China, EU-US relations and, most important, Ukraine. This means that, even if they succeed in pushing the European Commission to the right, they will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc.

3️⃣ Perhaps the most fundamental issue: the EU is not a democracy. The European Parliament doesn’t even have the power to initiate legislation, which is the basic hallmark of national parliaments. In the EU the real power isn’t exercised by the European Parliament, or even by democratically elected governments, but by institutions that are largely insulated from any form of democratic accountability — chiefly the European Commission, the ECB and the European Court of Justice. These are able to effectively enforce whatever policy they want on elected governments — and even forcibly remove them from office, as they did with Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.

4️⃣ Yes, the European Parliament exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, but the EP itself remains a fundamentally undemocratic institution itself. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council and known as trilogue — is opaque to say the least. This is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are, which in turn it makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested, and to the problem of oligarchic capture more in general. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.

5️⃣ On an even more fundamental level, none of this will ever change, even if the European Parliament is granted full legislative powers; for the simple reason that there is no European demos for the Parliament to represent. Such a demos — a political community generally defined by a shared and relatively homogenous language, culture, history, normative system, etc. — still only exists at the national level. Indeed, the EU remains deeply fractured along national economic, geopolitical and cultural fault lines — and this looks unlikely to change.

6️⃣ For all these reasons, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive NATO-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia.

7️⃣ The biggest impact of these election is likely to be the national fallout in certain countries — especially France, where Macron has called early legislative elections in the face of a crushing defeat to Marine Le Pen. This, however, also raises problems, as it points to yet another way in which the EU destabilises national politics. I’m glad to see Macron humiliated, but the idea that the European elections should have a direct bearing on nationally mandated governments is a dangerous one.

8️⃣ Ultimately, populists should never forget that constraining popular sovereignty and democracy — and resisting populist insurgencies such as the one we are currently witnessing across Europe — is in many ways the reason the EU was created in the first place. Those who believe in democracy and popular sovereignty should aim at tearing the EU down — not at reforming it.

For a deep dive on the election results, check out my latest article: https://t.co/htKJXyG8gA

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Biden just compared Putin to Hitler. If he believes this, why is the US not invading Russia - but, instead, lets the Ukrainians die alone while his military-industrial complex is laughing all the way to the bank? Biden's hypocrisy knows few bounds https://t.co/IZ6sokvSaR

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He should not be invited to address a joint meeting of Congress. I certainly will not attend.

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

The Labour Files series on Al Jazeera in September 2022 was totally ignored in mainstream media. In retrospective it was terrifyingly prescient. Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Diane Abbott affair MUST WATCH the whole series.