The Singleman Affair

[Vlad @VladTheInflator]

This is the Iran that mainstream media doesn't want Americans to see.

They want you to think everyone is a third world radical.

Why would they want to hide humanizing things about Iran?

[Eye on Palestine @EyeonPalestine]

This is what the Israeli army has done in Jabalia.

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

“I don’t give a fuck” - Coates on the prospect of losing access to power & platforms for speaking up about genocide & apartheid in Palestine.

[Typical African @Joe__Bassey]

Ritual Mask Of The Dogon People Of Mali 🇲🇱 g

[The Grayzone @TheGrayzoneNews]

Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells The Destruction Of Gaza

Watch @MaxBlumenthal's new documentary takedown of the media deceptions and hoaxes Israel pushed to manufacture consent for its genocidal assault on Gaza

In collaboration w/ @propandco & @sutjhally

[The Serfs (youtube.com/theserftimes) @theserfstv]

"I found a considerable lack of work after doing concerts for Palestinian children.. if that's the way it has to be, that's the way it has to be. If you support human rights, you gotta support them everywhere."

- Kris Kristofferson

[UNUMKenBurns @UNUMKenBurns]

Kris Kristofferson’s songs were pure poetry, rooted in the sanctity of everyday life. His contributions to Ken Burns’s Country Music added depth and authenticity to the story of that tradition.

He will be greatly missed.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

Hitler is on the loose and the world won’t stop him.

[Kentah Gwanjez @GWANJEZ]

"Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war."

[The Singleman Affair @SinglemanAffair]

If you can please consider helping out the one and only Dr. Charles Joseph Smith!

[Sooper Records @sooperrecords]

Please Donate to Chicago legend Dr. Charles Joseph Smith in his time of need. If you know you know https://t.co/sfXAPv4QfA

[Sooper Records @sooperrecords]

Please Donate to Chicago legend Dr. Charles Joseph Smith in his time of need. If you know you know https://t.co/sfXAPv4QfA

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One bizarre thing about modern US presidential races is watching politicians in one of the most dystopian civilizations ever to exist warning people that the other candidate wants to lead them into a dark dystopia, which depending on the party they label “communism” or “fascism”.

Yesterday I saw an amazingly idiotic tweet by Chuck Schumer responding to an equally idiotic tweet by Donald Trump. Trump had tweeted an AI image of Kamala Harris addressing the DNC convention in Chicago with a crowd full of red flags beneath a giant hammer and sickle, the suggestion of course being that Harris is a communist and the Democrats are a communist political party.

“The guy who loves Putin is projecting again,” Schumer said in response to Trump’s tweet.

I mean, where do you even start with this? Russian president Vladimir Putin is not a communist, Russia is not a communist country, and the Soviet Union ended more than three decades ago — all facts that the average fifth grader could have told the majority leader of the US senate.

Perhaps more significantly, Kamala Harris is about as far from a communist as anyone could possibly be, and the Democratic Party is devoutly capitalist. Ideologically Harris is much, much closer to Donald Trump than she is to communism, and from a communist point of view there isn’t a great deal of difference between Harris and Trump. They’re both imperialist lackeys of neoliberal capitalism, are both devoted to the US empire’s goal of stomping out communism around the world by any means necessary, and are both pledged to continue the exploitation, oppression, ecocide and warmongering of the status quo capitalist order if elected.

But this is all these freaks do every four years. Trump, who spent his entire presidential term ramping up cold war aggressions against Moscow, is accused of wanting to turn America into a fascistic autocracy ruled by Vladimir Putin. The Democrats, who play just as crucial a role in preserving the capitalist status quo as Republicans, are accused of trying to institute communism. All while campaigning to lead a nation that is arguably more dystopian than anything they claim the other candidate wants to create.

The US is the most tyrannical regime on the entire planet. No other power structure on earth has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other government is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars around the world, and working to destroy any population on earth who disobeys its dictates via invasions, proxy conflicts, bombing campaigns, starvation sanctions, staged coups and covert ops.

This is all held in place using the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed. Americans are the most propagandized population on earth, successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, laboring, spending, acting and voting exactly how the powerful want them to in a mind-controlled dystopia — all while believing themselves to be free. This propaganda machine extends its reach throughout the world, with most of its firepower focused on its close allies who are effectively member states in a globe-spanning empire.

The only reason the US empire isn’t seen for the horrifying blood-soaked dystopia it is is because of that very propaganda machine, which normalizes and glorifies this freakish status quo through both its “news” media and its mainstream culture manufacturing centers in New York and Los Angeles.

From the heart of this tyrannical nightmare, politicians warn that if you don’t vote for them you will find yourself in a nation that has been transformed into a tyrannical nightmare.

But what else are they going to do? Campaign on their actual policies and point out their actual differences from the other candidate? They don’t have any real differences. They’re both auditioning for the job of temporary mid-level management of the US empire, and you don’t get to have that job if you are in any way opposed to the interests of that empire.

Either of them will preside over the continuation of imperialist extraction, warmongering, militarism and genocide. Either of them will preside over the continuation of capitalist exploitation and ecocide. Either of them will preside over the continued expansion of authoritarian measures like surveillance, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism.

But they can’t just come out and say that. They wouldn’t be this close to getting the job if they were the types to say that. Saying that would wake people up to the reality of how profoundly unfree they really are, opening up the possibility for the birth of a real revolutionary movement.

So they babble about the other candidate wanting to usher you into some frightening future dystopia, hoping you won’t notice that dystopia is already here.

[The Singleman Affair @SinglemanAffair]

@GratefulDead Brown eyed women

[Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism @beyond_capital]

Ruling classes, your days are numbered!

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

Joe Biden may have made Juneteenth an official holiday but there are few politicians who have done more to inflict misery on poor people of color. Half of the students I teach in prison would not be there but for Biden and Bill Clinton. In the 1970s, Biden fought school busing, arguing that segregation was beneficial for Blacks.  He and South Carolina’s racist senator, Strom Thurmond, sponsored the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior.

Biden sponsored and aggressively pushed the 1994 crime bill, which he also helped draft, calling for its passage because “We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” The bill expanded  the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes and mandated life imprisonment for a third violent felony, also known as the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, more than doubling the nation’s prison population.

The bill provided funds to add 100,000 new police officers and build new prisons, on the condition that prisoners serve their entire sentences. He pushed through the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus, abolished the rights of death row prisoners and mandated harsh federal sentencing rules.

In addition, Biden takes credit for writing the 2001 Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to monitor anyone’s phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track activity on the internet.

He backed austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. He fought for NAFTA and other “free trade” deals which fueled inequality, deindustrialization, a significant drop in wages and the offshoring of  millions of manufacturing jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, China or Vietnam.

He also backed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that, as Human Rights Watch wrote, “eliminated key defenses against deportation and subjected many more immigrants, including legal permanent residents, to detention and deportation.” Biden has spent his political career perpetuating the systems of neoslavery that mock the emancipation of Black men and women this day is supposed to celebrate.

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

Israel's Suicide

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare that will continue at least until the end of this year — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy...

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit Indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers.

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

There is no other way to say this: the (lack of) reaction to the scenes of sheer carnage, burned refugee bodies, and decapitated babies coming out of Rafah tonight from the U.S. political and media establishments is nothing other than the normalizing, the banalizing, of genocide.