Sandgropper

Contrarian humanist and seeker of truth, a passionate loather of hypocrisies and an enthusiastic advocate of home bread baking.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

1. The Holocaust was evil, as everyone knows
2. The Holocaust was NOT uniquely evil, as some claim
3. Throughout history there have been other comparable genocides, often carried out by Europeans against indigenous people
4. The genocide in Gaza is not the same as the Holocaust, obviously, but it is in the same moral category
5. The Nazis killed babies, children, women and men BECAUSE they were Jews. The Israelis kill babies, children, women and men BECAUSE they are Palestinian
6. Israel and its supporters weaponise and abuse the memory of the Holocaust, sometimes to close down argument and sometimes even to justify the genocide in Gaza

[Bean @SomersetBean]

"To call a decent person antisemitic because he dares to criticize Israel is shameful because it will make antisemitism respectable. And shame upon those people who make these false accusations against us as journalists." - Robert Fisk

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

I promise you Digital ID will cause you far more trouble than it will solve, between having your identity easily stolen by hackers and being unable to access things you used to use with no hassle without it.

You will curse it, no one wants or needs this trash.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@RichardJMurphy He will ultimately be remembered as a stooge and creature of the UK deep state.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@Kathleen_Tyson_ @RnaudBertrand Their wealth defines, oppresses, and ultimately consumes them.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@baoshaoshan Australia is a supplicant vassal to the US Empire, and the billions being spent on AUKUS is not for Australian defence - it is tribute demanded by the Empire.

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

This conversation between Alexei Sayle, Miriam Margolyes & Michael Rosen is magnificent. Funny, fascinating, heartfelt, insightful & wise. The very best of Jewish humour, intellect & progressive politics. Definitely the Right Jews

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[michael e. v. knight @michaelevknight]

Capitalists...

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@PhillipAdams_1 The fundamental principle underpinning all modern propaganda and narrative control systems.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@BladeoftheS We can but hope.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@BygoneBritain Looks like a Constable painting.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is something that happens to Americans who actually reckon with the history.

Not the ones who perform reckoning, who say "we need to do better" and mean better social media representation and more diverse superhero franchises, but the ones who actually sit with what was done in their name, in specific places, to specific people, over generations.

Something breaks open.

And what they discover on the other side of that breaking is not self-hatred, despite what the defenders of innocence always predict.

What they discover is the ability to see.

To see that the world is full of people who have been surviving American power for decades, who are not waiting for American permission to be legitimate, who have developed extraordinary intellectual and moral and political traditions that no textbook they were given acknowledged as real.

To see that the countries described as "failed states" and "unstable regions" did not fail on their own.

They were destabilized by specific actions taken by specific actors who are named in documents that exist in archives.

To see that the "international community" that keeps appearing in news reports to validate or condemn countries is mostly the United States and its allies, and that the countries left outside that community are not left out because they failed a moral test but because they failed a loyalty test.

To see all of this is not to hate America.

It is to see clearly.

And seeing clearly is the most threatening thing you can do to any system that depends on the population not seeing clearly.

The ones who get there know something they cannot un-know.

The empire needs them to not get there.

It has built an entire culture to prevent it.

[Solo Monk @JJKALE2]

John Lyons, one of Aust’s most experienced investigative journalists @abcnews:

“In 40 yrs in journalism, I’ve dealt with smart, powerful lobby groups. But none compares to the pro-Israel lobby in Aust. It is formidable, well-funded & effective"

Sharri Markson wants him sacked.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Brilliant news and not a moment too soon! 👇🏼

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

In the 1950's 60's and 70's countries were largely run by their Politicians.

Now every country is run by the same handful of billionaires, the Politicians are just puppets and all they care about is cashing in.

This what needs to be destroyed.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Billionaires make sure work doesn't pay.
Landlords make sure housing isn't affordable.
Taxes are only for you.

The system works to keep the people who run it rich and in charge forever.

The system is broken beyond repair.

[Sandgropper @Sandgropper2]

@WorkersPartyGB @georgegalloway WW3 is already well underway and has been for sometime. In the same way when WW2 started people expected it to be like WW1, people thought WW3 would be like WW2. It isn't. WW3 is an information & propaganda war, and one of its largest theatres is the hearts & minds of the public.