Lance M

Associate Professor of Education. I study media literacy, pragmatism, John Dewey.

[Briahna Joy Gray @briebriejoy]

Then why didn't you run yourself, or support a change candidate? What's the point of being an Independent if you spend your political capital manufacturing consent for candidates who you, apparently, don't even believe in?

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Dems have spent the past 8 years destroying the one movement that could have saved them. Bernie's class first populism won over exactly the type of voters (Latinos, working class, bros, Joe Rogan!) that Dems now repel. https://t.co/LhfSDK5pUb

[Ric Flair® @RicFlairNatrBoy]

GO BLUE! WOOOOO! 💪🏻 @UMichFootball

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

My thoughts on the assassination attempt on former President Trump:

The assassination of Trump would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking, attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based science and journalism long before Trump did. Cults are a product of social decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode in another financial crisis.

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression, which have impoverished the working class, fostered endless war, militarized our police, created the largest prison system in the world, licensed corporations to exploit the most vulnerable and transferred wealth upwards into the hands of a billionaire class, neuters the press, Trump's critics and the Democratic Party.

Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like resistance movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience, especially strikes, and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, rather than Trump, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a bankrupt Democratic Party -- whose presidential candidate is in clear cognitive decline -- that is a full partner in corporate oppression and cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Biden Lets Ukraine Strike Russia With US Weapons While Ukraine Attacks Russian Nuclear Defenses

Well it finally happened: Biden is now letting Ukraine strike Russian territory with US-supplied weapons. Escalations in nuclear brinkmanship which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago are becoming increasingly common as Ukraine loses more and more territory and runs out of soldiers to fight.

In a new report from Politico titled “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons” which cites multiple anonymous US officials, the article’s authors correctly describe the new White House authorization as a “stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight.”

This report comes shortly after an article by The New York Times titled “From Allies and Advisers, Pressure Grows on Biden to Allow Attacks on Russian Territory,” in which David E Sanger accurately forecast that “Biden is edging toward what may prove to be one of his most consequential decisions in the war for Ukraine: whether to reverse his ban on shooting American weapons into Russian territory.”

Politico reports that the approval for these attacks is limited to “solely near the area of Kharkiv,” but, again, these escalations were once unthinkable even for this administration, and every time a new escalation is authorized the warmongers are already well on their way to pushing for a further one. We will surely see increasing calls for Biden to authorize US-backed strikes deeper into Russian territory in the coming weeks.

This new development comes just after we learned that Ukraine has been repeatedly attacking Russia’s early warning systems for incoming nuclear strikes, with Ukrainian drones targeting Russian radar sites hundreds of miles from Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Just a few years ago if I had told you that a NATO proxy would soon be attacking Russia’s nuclear defense infrastructure, you’d probably have assumed we’d be pretty close to another Cuban Missile Crisis-level nuclear standoff, and that it would be receiving high levels of alarm and attention. But this report is barely in the news, and hardly anyone in the west even knows it’s happening.

This also comes as Reuters reports that France is preparing to send “several hundred” troops to Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, which of course means we may soon be seeing the armed forces of a NATO power getting killed by the Russian military.

Any of these three new developments has the potential to lead to unpredictable events which spiral out of control into a nuclear war between NATO and the Russian Federation, which would be the single worst thing that could possibly happen on planet Earth. There is no excuse for anyone to be playing around anywhere remotely close to such a precipice, and yet here we are.

As we discussed last year, the terrifying thing about the west’s pattern of continually escalating against Russia every time it doesn’t get a nuclear ICBM in the kisser for the last escalation naturally incentivizes Russia to attack NATO directly in order to re-establish its credibility for deterrence. So far Russia has been content to respond to NATO’s escalations by just tearing into Ukraine with greater and greater ferocity, but if the western empire keeps interpreting every time Russia doesn’t attack NATO forces directly as a sign that it’s safe to keep escalating, at some point Russia’s going to have to hit NATO.

It is not sane or acceptable that any of this is happening. The empire knowingly provoked this war, and now it’s getting more and more casual about risking the life of everyone on this planet as its proxy runs out of lives to throw into its gears.

And it’s so hard to draw attention to this, because there are so many other horrible things happening in the world which the western empire is also directly responsible for. The empire is increasingly acting like a wounded, cornered animal as China rises and the US slowly sinks into post-primacy, the only major difference being that wounded, cornered animals have teeth and claws instead of weapons of armageddon.

[George Hale @georgehale]

State police are back in Bloomington helping Indiana University officials demolish a Gaza protest camp for the second time in three days. IU police say 23 people are now in custody. The encampment is gone but organizers say they'll rebuild

[CombatPigeon96 🚀 @CombatPigeon96]

There is a fucking sniper on the roof of the IMU overlooking the Palestine protest at IU. There is also a tactical helicopter.

What.
The.
Fuck.

[WRTV Indianapolis @wrtv]

HAPPENING NOW | Students at IU Bloomington are holding a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on Dunn Meadow.

[Lance M @lancemason22]

https://t.co/hczIhrNMeF

Happy to be part of this John Dewey Society panel on AI and Digital Futures:

[Michigan Football @UMichFootball]

IT’S GREAT TO BE A MICHIGAN WOLVERINE!

#GoBlue

[Michigan Football @UMichFootball]

💪

[Michigan Football @UMichFootball]

Gooooood morning Wolverines!

Waking up Rose Bowl champions! 🌹

#GoBlue

[Mohamed E. Saleh @mesalehcom]

keep learning and growing.

#educationalquotes #quoteoftheday