@fondantfrog@bluesky

she/her

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@Mimiiben1 63

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@waitmaya 31

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@SolaAustralis @Kon__K I bet you leave the kids with your mum. Like, all the time.

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@KirstiMiller30 Thanks for your work and for educating people, Kirsti.

[Bec Shaw @Brocklesnitch]

@roisinmurphy im a lesbian and my community is only ever expanded and enhanced by the inclusion of trans people. terfs have no clue about what they are missing out on by hating and excluding. and don't talk for me.

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@DisillusionedH @AdorableEstrie Spenno (makes note to use this bastardised abbreviation)

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Fran Lebowitz on the billionaires: “Every time someone suggests [a wealth tax] they say I’m moving. Go! They add nothing to New York. In the 19th century, those robber barons, they employed people. All this money magic employs no one. Goodbye, go. We don’t need you”

[Frances Lumsden @FrancesLumsden]

I was a tiny 4 year old girl when a ‘drinking friend’ of my father, shoved his penis down my throat. I could not breath, the pain ripped through my body rendering me paralysed. I thought I was going to die. His orgasm, which I came to understand later ( for as a child I had no concept of such a thing) was terrifying, his body shook as he abandoned himself to his pleasure. I remember his smell, his weight, his strength. I remember the pain, the terror, the total lack of understanding of what was happening to me. How can a 4 year old child “consent” to something she does not even understand? I was NOT traumatised by being told I was traumatised. I was traumatised by his violation of my body and mind. For he threatened me into silence. I stayed silent for 50 odds years. But not now. These paeodophile men can attempt to justify their wickedness til the moon turns to dust, they will still be abusers, violators, criminals, worse that any animal. They are self centred bastards, who ruin the lives of children. They should be put in jail in perpetuity.

[stranger @strangerous10]

Pauline Hanson completely flips her lid, unable to handle the fact she relies on Neo-Nazi support. Can’t deny they give her their vote, but won’t explain it’s coz her policies suit their agenda.
Watch Anna Henderson put her in a world of pain.
I guess the truth hurts. 🔥 #auspol

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@katinadoc @LolsysL @SenatorClaire Which records in particular?

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@emmm_deeeee @BenFordhamLive Which is what? What does a woman look like?

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

Never forget how Israel murdered Palestinian First Responders on a literal live stream.

Repost this. Please I beg you

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@DrewPavlou You got comprehension problems, little man. They still haven’t picked you yet to be an insider have they? Cry harder

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@nikeaustralia Taking away Grace Tame’s contract because she supports human rights? No Nike products for me ever again. Nike supports genocide. Just do it.

[@fondantfrog@bluesky @fondantfrog]

@OzKitsch @therorocirco

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The US government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The US podium people have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.

At a Monday press conference, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”

“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.

During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the US position on Israel’s land grab, saying, “What precipitated their move into the buffer zone was the withdrawal of the Syrian armed forces, which, as I said yesterday, creates potentially a vacuum that could be filled by any one of the numerous terrorist organizations that continue to operate inside Syria that have sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel.”

During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And as it happens the US government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.

So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a US puppet regime.

These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.

In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the US empire.

Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the US and its allies and you’ll find them on the US government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the US was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror”, but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group has been fighting Assad in Syria and may prove useful in the empire’s cold war aggressions against China.

Even now the US House of Representatives is moving to ban the US government from using the statistics of Gaza’s health ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the health ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza health ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the US State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.

The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.

This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists.

You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the US empire.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

“Terrorist Organization” Means Whatever The US Wants It To Mean

"It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the US empire."

Reading by Tim Foley.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Only Israel could invade a country and steal a bunch of its land and bomb it 480 times in 48 hours and then say it does not seek to interfere in that country's internal affairs.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

This article is nearly 20 years old.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

The collective Western reporting of Syria this week puts me in mind of this all-timer.