Francine 🍉☮️

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The American worker has been told, for fifty years, that his enemy is:

The immigrant taking his job.

The welfare recipient taking his taxes.

The foreign country taking his factory.

The liberal elite taking his culture.

The woke movement taking his children.

He has not been told that in 1978 the average CEO made 30 times the average worker's salary.

That today that number is 350 times.

That this did not happen by accident.

That it happened through specific policy decisions made by specific people with specific interests, enacted through a political system that those people fund.

He has not been told that because the people who decide what he's told are the people who benefited from those decisions.

The enemy was always upward.

The propaganda has always pointed sideways.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

They're designing park benches
so that homeless people can't sleep on them
and placing metal spikes beneath overpasses
so they can't be used as shelter.

Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn't exist
and that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer,
wocka wocka
ha ha ha
it's funny because it's a witty observation
about life's everyday little goofy goofs.

Fast food wrappers blow in the wind
like the leaves used to do.

Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wings
peer down at the din of civilization
as we march over the sidewalk sleepers
to our Jobs,
stepping over dead bodies
while staring at our phones
and counting the minutes
til we can go home to our sofas
and watch wocka wocka comedians
and shovel SSRIs into our faces
from large plastic bowls
so the crushing beauty of our world
and the knowledge of our mortality
doesn't topple us like Jenga blocks
and make us weep like open fire hydrants.

In this din they don't want you to feel.
They don't want you to think.
They don't want you to hear.
They keep it all CLANG, CLANG, CLANG,
BUY, BUY, BUY,
WORK, WORK, WORK,
WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA,
so that you can't feel your body.
So that you can't hear the songs.

There's bird song
and whale song
and heart song
and lung song.

There's fire song
and sea song
and wind song
and tree song.

There's ancestor song
and mountain song
and sun song
and wolf song,
and lots of others I bet;
I can't hear any of them.

Oh, except thought song,
which blasts through my head
like a sonic homeless deterrent
in a shopping center alleyway,
and,
like them,
I have nowhere else to go.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The moment a political movement in America threatens actual class power, not cultural norms, not symbolic representation, not rhetorical radicalism, but the actual redistribution of resources from people who have too much to people who have too little, the response is not debate.

The response is destruction.

Not always physical.

Character. Credibility. Association. Legal. Financial.

They destroyed the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, which was feeding 20,000 children a day, not because it was violent, but because it was effective and it was building the wrong kind of politics.

J. Edgar Hoover called it the most dangerous program in America.

A breakfast program.

For children.

That is the tell.

They will tolerate any amount of radical aesthetics, radical language, radical identity politics.

The line is drawn at the moment the politics touches the money.

Remember where the line is.

It tells you everything about what they are actually afraid of.

[Dr Rhonda Garad Difficult by Design @RhondaGarad]

This took my breath away: We didn't name the slaughtered children because Israel would go after their remaining family.
We can't even name the victims of the deplorable genocidaries.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Shocking to see this on tape

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

John Spencer is given multiple chances to answer a simple question: "How many civilians has Israel killed in Gaza?" Tellingly, he can't answer it.

His premise is fraudulent. Gaza is not "modern warfare." Gaza has no army, no air defenses, no standard artillery. It has lightly armed resistance fighters facing one of the most powerful militaries on earth.

In those conditions, there is no "war." There is sporadic fighting between the Palestinian resistance and invading Israeli soldiers, whose tanks, drones, and warplanes carry out the mass murder of a besieged civilian population.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You were not given a culture war because your rulers are stupid.

You were given a culture war because your rulers are afraid.

Afraid of the number.

The number is: there are more of you than there are of them.

In every society, in every moment of history, the primary political problem of those with concentrated power is:

How do we remain a minority that governs a majority?

The answers across history: religion, nationalism, racism, spectacle, debt, and the managed division of the majority against itself.

America, at its height, deployed all of them simultaneously with unprecedented sophistication.

The racism that kept Black and white workers from organizing together.

The nationalism that made working class men die in wars that served capital.

The debt that turned the aspiration for a middle-class life into a thirty-year financial instrument owned by a bank.

The spectacle of electoral politics that made the "choice" between two capital-funded parties feel like democracy.

And underneath all of it, the culture war: hot, vivid, identity-laden, morally urgent-feeling.

Keeping the majority divided, distracted, and directing its considerable anger everywhere except upward.

The fear is justified.

If you ever stop fighting each other long enough to count, the number is very clear.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

I read this 5 times to make sure I was properly comprehending that he is actually facing 30 years for having leftist reading materials. Beyond insane

[Kerry Burgess @KerryBurgess]

The IDF arresting more Hamas fighters...

[Francine 🍉☮️ @freines1]

Clean sweep!!

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

There are two types of racism in the west: the kind that’s considered acceptable in polite liberal society, and the kind that’s widely frowned upon.

The acceptable type of racism is the kind which considers it fine and normal to drop bombs on Muslim families overseas. The kind which sees starvation sanctions as a minor issue whose pros and cons are assessed solely on the basis of whether they will be successful or unsuccessful in achieving regime change. The kind which views imperialist extraction from the global south as the natural order of the world, with centrists and progressives squabbling only about how evenly that plunder should be distributed among westerners.

The unacceptable type of racism is the kind which affects other westerners. The kind whose consequences western liberals have to see.

If a white woman calls the police on a black man minding his own business in the park, western liberals will send her viral on social media, and she will be unwelcome in polite society until the heat dies down. If a celebrity is caught on tape uttering an ethnic slur, they’ll be unpopular for a while, and will be considered a liability by sponsors and film studios. This is the wrong kind of racism.

That’s what you’re seeing whenever the western press completely ignores a dozen Palestinians getting killed by western-made munitions on the same day the entire news media focuses on some allegation of “antisemitism” with no material consequences other than some western Jews feeling emotionally upset. The former is the right kind of racism, while the latter is the wrong kind. One is seen as acceptable and normal, while the other is a horrifying abuse.

Western racism falls into two distinct categories because our entire civilization is built upon the polite kind, whereas the impolite kind is useful to the powerful only as a wedge issue to keep western populations divided against each other. Mainstream western politics is often just a culture war between one major party which embraces both the polite and impolite kinds of racism against another major party which only embraces the polite kind of racism, thereby ensuring that no political energy goes toward ending the polite kind of racism.

The polite kind of racism is much more important to the powerful in the 21st century, because it’s an absolutely foundational component to their rule rather than merely a useful tool. Without the imperialist extraction of labor and resources from the global south at extortionate prices, you wouldn’t see sprawling megacorporations turning millionaires into billionaires and trillionaires who then use their wealth to manipulate western politics to promote their own agendas. Without nonstop military expansionism and the abuses of the western intelligence cartel, the managers of the western empire could not dominate our planet.

That’s why every few years westerners get to vote on whether or not to advance the impolite kind of racism in their society, while the polite kind of racism never appears on the ballot. You’re allowed to vote on whether or not your government will become more abusive to immigrants and other marginalized members of your society, but you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue. This expression of racism (or white supremacism, or xenophobia, or western supremacism, or whatever you want to call it) is considered too important to be left to the will of the electorate.

And you see this reflected in the consciousness of the western mind. Even relatively aware westerners who would place themselves on the far left of the political spectrum will often spend a lot more energy on domestic issues than the abuses of the western war machine.

Earlier this month the discourse on Left Twitter revolved around whether or not it was a “privileged take” to say that people shouldn’t serve in the US military, the argument being that many US military personnel come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I saw a lot of US progressives who furiously disparage ICE agents and American cops falling all over themselves to defend those who enlist in the US war machine, which is quantifiably far more murderous and oppressive than domestic American law enforcement.

The only way to see things this way would be to view those who live in the global south as less human than people who live in the United States. That’s the only way it could possibly make sense in your mind to see the abuses of your country’s domestic police forces as worse than the demonstrably more egregious abuses of the US war machine. You’d have to view a school full of Iranian children being blown up by the US Navy as less worthy of attention and opposition than an American being beaten by a police officer in the United States. You’d have to assume those Iranian lives don’t matter.

And those are some of the more awake members of western society. Most westerners are a lot less conscious and compassionate than that.

Westerners live in the most savage and murderous civilization on earth. We don’t feel like we are savage and murderous because we outsource most of our violence and slavery to overseas operations, but that’s what we are. We go about our lives consuming products made by wage slaves under an oppression machine that is defended through constant mass military slaughter, and then we wag our fingers at a viral video of some schizophrenic saying racist things in order to feel nice feelings about ourselves. That’s what western life is, right there.

We’ve got a lot of growing up to do. We are in need of drastic, revolutionary change, more extensive than probably most of us can imagine at this point in time. We’ve got a long, long way to go, and a whole, whole lot of wrongs we need to make right around the world.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

A 4-year old girl.
A 14-year old girl.
A 51-year old mother of six.
Al Jazeera photojournalist Ahmed Samir Wishah.
8-year old girl Julia al-Balawi

… are among the more than 15 people Israel murdered in Gaza this weekend.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Reporter: Some members of the Jewish community, including Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer, were alarmed by the language you used at the rally last week, calling AIPAC monsters who move dark money.

Mamdani: I want to be very clear. We’re talking about a status quo where children are being killed on a daily basis. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the so-called ceasefire.

Even an Al Jazeera journalist, Ahmed Wishah, was killed this past Saturday by an Israeli strike. And when I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people not just in Palestine but, frankly, throughout much of the region.

And it is a status quo of immorality. It is one that I will not accept. And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo, oftentimes they defend it through direct contributions, as we are seeing right now in New York 13.

Oftentimes they also support the status quo through dark money, by funneling money that would have previously come directly from AIPAC through other organizations whose contributors’ identities are only made clear after an election.

And I think it is important that when we ask ourselves how such death and destruction is happening overseas, we also name those who allow it to take place.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You ended with "you need to learn how to understand things better."

I'll end with this.

The confidence in that sentence, the complete, unexamined certainty that you understand and I don’t, that your framework is reality and mine is naivety, that the appropriate response to documented evidence of American-backed coups, torture, and civilian casualties is to tell the person citing the evidence that they need more education:

That confidence is not a personal failing.

It is a cultural product.

It was built into you by the same apparatus that built the empire: the films, the textbooks, the news coverage, the political speeches, the pervasive, lifelong, never-interrogated assumption that American power is the protagonist of history and everyone who questions it is either naive or malicious.

I don't say this to insult you.

I say it because it matters.

Because the most dangerous defender of an unjust system is not the cynic who knows what it is and defends it for personal gain.

It is the true believer who has never once been given the tools to examine what they believe.

You were given a story.

The story said you were one of the good ones, from one of the good countries, and that the people questioning that story just don't understand things.

I'm asking you to consider, seriously, just once, the possibility that the people who've been on the receiving end of your country's choices understand them rather well.

Better, perhaps, than the people who only ever experienced them as something that happened far away, to people who don't fully exist, in a story where Americans are always, in the end, the ones who "meant well."

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Erick, you suggested I might be "under communist rule" without American intervention.

Let's examine the "communist threat" that required 58,000 American deaths and three million Vietnamese deaths to contain.

Vietnam, after the war, became a socialist republic. It is today a single-party state with a market economy, a growing middle class, significant foreign investment including from American companies, and a government that the United States has full diplomatic relations with.

Vietnam is also, incidentally, a popular tourist destination for Americans.

The dominos did not fall.

Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia: none of them became communist.

The entire strategic premise of the war, the foundational justification for the deaths of millions of people, was wrong.

But here is the more important point:

Even if Vietnam had become a Soviet-aligned communist state, the choice of Vietnam’s political system was Vietnam’s to make.

It was not America's to make.

Not with bombs.

Not with chemical weapons.

Not with half a million troops.

The logic that says, "We had to kill millions of Vietnamese people to prevent them from choosing a government we didn't approve of," is not the logic of freedom.

It is the logic of empire.

Naming it "stopping evil" doesn't change the logic.

It just makes it harder to see.

[Francine 🍉☮️ @freines1]

Obama Legacy: As Celebrities Descended Upon Chicago Presidential Center, Across Town Firefighters Were Evacuating Patients From Another Private-Equity-Destroyed Hospital | naked capitalism https://t.co/p3Eh8LVhCa

[Tehran Tadhg @TadhgHickey]

Imagine being Palestinian or Lebanese looking at this pure dystopian shit 😳

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

This doesn’t leave much room for doubt, does it?

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Sorry, operating where?

[Nada Maucourant Atallah @MaucourantNada]

Very sad to learn that Mona Khalil died after weeks in the ICU following an Israeli strike that levelled her home in Mansouri. She was a very well-known environmental activist and dedicated her life to saving endangered turtles. She stayed in the south despite Israeli strikes because of her love for the land.

She was a civilian, a renowned figure but Israel targeted her house.

CNN profiled her in 2017 here: https://t.co/ZaMRnuS4zf

“I live every day to the fullest and don’t worry about tomorrow,” she told the newspaper.