So when you read about eight members of an NBC News Team being beaten by Israeli settlers today in the West Bank, it's important to note two things:
1. The settler wouldn't do this to Americans had they not received a green light from the Israeli gov.
2. Israel's gov would not have given such a green light unless it felt confident that the US gov - and Amb. Huckabee - wouldn't lift a finger to defend the Americans.
Pope Francis: "I continue to receive very serious and painful news from Gaza. Unarmed civilians are subjected to bombings and shootings. A mother and her daughter were killed by Israeli snipers while going to the restroom. It is terrorism."
There has been significant noise surrounding the recent visit by CIA director John Ratcliffe to Moscow which was presented as a warning to Russian leadership. According to numerous sources the U.S. received viable intelligence confirming a political shift within the Kremlin allowing for more escalatory and Kinetic action against NATO members who are directly supporting the war in Ukraine. Many people have been downplaying this as a political move by Washington which is always a possibility but I have a different perspective on it which has been partially influenced by private conversations with a source inside the Russian MOD. The recent public acknowledgment of Russian intelligence being used by Iran to conduct more effective strikes against US targets in the region was the first step in this shift to a more aggressive approach. With the U.S. now overextended in the ME the timing window for Russia is open. The idea is not an invasion of NATO territory but rather minimal antagonistic action which reaches and potentially crosses the line for NATO articles to be triggered. The U.S. is in no position to intervene and this opens up the opportunity to sow disillusion within the outer NATO states, much like we’ve seen with the gulf states. As soon as that first infringement by Russia is ignored or downplayed the gates open and the entire idea behind NATO is destroyed. I would be looking for more aggressive, cruise missile pathing, potentially drone strikes on areas within NATO nations directly on the border with Ukraine, who are supporting military actions, greater sabotage operations in NATO nations and more aggressive action to defend Russias “shadow fleet” in international waters.
The time has now come for compensatory action by Russia and to use its position of leverage against a distracted hegemon.
@ProudSocialist I hate the guy, but can’t find myself to like this piece of news, because it just means the fascist state continues to run out of control
Yeah, it tends to happen like that.
You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it's Palestine.
You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you've been taught about your world was a lie.
Every war. Everything about how your government really operates. Everything you've been told about nations and how they work. Everything about capitalism and communism and how your society is structured. It was all lies, fed to you by parents, teachers, preachers, pundits, politicians and news men from the moment you were old enough to process complex thought.
It can feel scary. It can feel like the end of your world, because in a sense that's exactly what it is. Your sincere pursuit of the truth leads to the unraveling of everything you thought you knew, and you find yourself plunging into a great abyss of uncertainty about what's real.
And a lot of people do get lost at this juncture. They plunge down too many rabbit holes with too much paranoia and not enough critical thinking, and they wind up replacing all their old indoctrinated belief system with new beliefs that are just as crazy and power-serving as the first ones. There's often a gap between letting go of your old worldview and assembling a new one where it's easy to get confused and misled.
But if you remain sincere, careful, relentlessly self-honest and dedicated to the truth while ensuring your critical thinking faculties remain operating at full power, you eventually emerge from this chrysalis phase with the wings of a truth-based worldview. You can now not only see through the old lies, but can understand what's really going on in the world.
And what's really going on in the world is a lot less pleasant than the fictions you were fed as a schoolchild. You can see that we are ruled by a transnational alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who manipulate world affairs to maximize their power and profits at the expense of ordinary working people around the globe, and you can see that those same powerful abusers are responsible for constructing the fictional power-serving worldview you just freed yourself from.
And when you see how unpleasant the truth is and how hard you had to work to realize it, you understand why relatively few people have awakened to it. From the perspective of the ego, it's a whole lot of effort and discomfort without much in the way of payoff. Forming a truth-based worldview is something you do for its own sake, and if you're not the sort of person who views truth as its own reward, then you're not the sort of person who's likely to pursue it.
But more and more people are choosing truth. More and more people are spotting a loose thread labeled "Gaza" or "Epstein" or what have you, and giving it a curious tug. Despite the discomfort, despite the required effort, and despite the great cost of having to sacrifice the world they thought they knew about the world, they're pulling that thread, and they keep on pulling. We're seeing it more and more every year.
And that gives me hope. I don't know where this is headed or whether we win in the end, but I'm seeing enough movement in human consciousness at mass scale to continue holding out hope for a better world.
It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.
If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under.
Whenever I say this online I’ll get some Trotskyist or anarchist babbling about the need to express “solidarity” with Iranian political prisoners or whatever, but whenever I press them on what actual, material benefit those expressions of “solidarity” bring to the people they’re meant to help, they can’t point to anything solid. Whereas I can point to some very obvious ways in which contributing to an imperial war propaganda campaign can help grease the wheels for real material actions which hurt actual Iranians.
If you’re a westerner, you have an obligation to use your voice responsibly. If you are feeding into the latest “the people in the empire-targeted nation need liberation from their evil tyrannical government” war propaganda narrative with your expressions of “solidarity” and your blind insistence on treating all bad things as equally bad, then you are using your western voice irresponsibly, and you are morally culpable for the mass slaughter you help facilitate with your recklessness.
It’s not okay to be a citizen of the western empire and act like human rights abuses in an empire-targeted nation are of equal or comparable concern to the far more egregious abuses of your own leaders and their allies. It’s also not okay to be a fully grown adult and believe the use of force in empire-targeted governments is happening separately from their targeting by the empire, as though Iran would look the way it looks today if the US and Israel had not been working to collapse and control it for generations.
Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order.
The western empire therefore makes the world a crueler and more abusive place not only by its direct acts of cruelty and abuse, but by the way it forces its targets to choose between (A) annihilation and (B) using extreme amounts of force to retain their sovereignty. The empire we live under is responsible for the vast majority of the dysfunction and misery in our world, and yet you as a westerner want to spend your time yelling at Iran? Fuck off, man.
Flock takes their privacy very seriously.
But the ethical gray area in surveillance technology works both ways.
Under no circumstances should elected officials or public servants enjoy an expectation of privacy when spending tax dollars to attend a surveillance lobbying event.
I was genuinely moved seeing a Russian athlete crying after winning gold, no flag raised and no anthem played.
This humiliation has to end. Israeli athletes who took part in the genocide in Gaza are competing freely & w/o issue, while Russians are being publicly humiliated.