#Guardians of freedom

[caught-in-a-landslide]

The Warrior of Freedom.

The Protector of Freedom.

The Questioner of Freedom.

[josephkravis]

Six Snaps: Propter Hoc Tantum | Vol. 1

Shadows of the Unknown

Shadows of the Unknown A Portrait of Mystique The Sentinel A hooded guardian with fierce eyes and an aura of quiet strength, she navigates the shadows with an unwavering resolve, embodying mystery and latent power. The Unveiled A powerful, unveiled woman with an intense gaze that speaks of unspoken stories and resilience, framed by an abstract background that hints at a post-apocalyptic…

[onlylonelylatino]

Blue Beetle and the All-Star Squadron & Freedom Fighters by Jerry Ordway

[diana-andraste]

Hair-plaiting for the Iranian resistance

‘This was inspired by a daily ritual in which female fighters in the mountains plait each other’s hair while chanting: “Woman, life, freedom.” It was a response to the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in Iran.'

Photo by Hoda Afshar

[madame-helen]

[thelasthippie]

The existence of a point , there on the far universe that we are all from the same cocoon. From the same mud, from the same earth.

From the same database, from the same biotechnology. Going to nowhere from nowhere.

From the same brotherhood. Guardians helping to survive each other . The survival of soul, of conscience, of peace.

Where all of us understand that there's no other meaning... To feel.

We are all one. We are earth. We are universe.

[drsonnet]

The story of Gaza’s destruction in 100 lives – a visual guide _ Israel-Gaza war _ The Guardian

[kookies2000]

Gonna go see The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 again this weekend, so I watched the other two films........

You're kidding! Marvel really put Lyllas name in Rocket's records from the first film, and they had the nerve to kill her without even letting her see the sky like she wanted?

[fireangelsstuff]

If you are an American and you value the right to free speech and the right to protest or are a foreigner to the USA who doesn't think that the US government should have the right to prevent you from being able to speak out against something then you need to educate yourself on what the US Govt is currently trying to do to Julian Assange and the real reasons why they are trying to push through KOSA

The goal is to control the flow of information to hide what we could not see when we couldn't watch what they were doing on our phones

If they manage to extradite him to the USA they will be able to do this to any and all Journalists or citizens of other countries. They are attempting to create a situation that will allow them to violate the sovereignty of other nations through something other than lobbying/bribery

This is why the USA does not care about the deaths of journalists in the Occupied State of Palestine who were exposing the war crimes they have been funding and sponsoring via social media

After the International Criminal court is done with Israel it needs to go after the US and British governments for it's complicity in the Genocide in Palestine, but also the other crimes it has committed previously that Assange managed to expose them for in Iraq and Afghanistan

It is my own personal speculation that copies of what was given to Assange by Chelsea Manning that The Guardian was forced to destroy still exist and they are actively trying to prevent it from going to trial

[gamer2002]

Funny enough, when BLM was organizing city burnings via previous Twitter, nobody bothered to arrest/censor Twitter over it.

[coquelicoq]

the...for lack of a better word amount of suicidality i kept inside me as a teen and young adult out of fear of my loved ones committing me was so damaging. it just isolated me further at a time when i felt so unspeakably alone. if i had been able to feel that just telling someone about how i was feeling wouldn't invite them to violate my bodily integrity and autonomy...i can't even imagine what a difference that would have made.

[deadpresidents]

What have you been reading since the last time you posted your latest reads?

It's been a few months since I updated my latest reads, so I'm probably going to forget a few titles, but here's what I've been reading since then:

•The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Pancho Villa: A Revolutionary Life by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and translated by Todd Chretien (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite by Dean King (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day by Garrett M. Graff (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk by William Stadiem (BOOK)

•The House Divided: Sunni, Shia, and the Making of the Middle East by Barnaby Rogerson (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Founders' Curse: James Monroe's Struggle Against Political Parties by Brook Poston (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 by Robert W. Merry (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom Remade the World by Don H. Doyle (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty by Alexander Larman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis by George Stephanopoulos with Lisa Dickey (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War by James B. Conroy (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Ballyhoo!: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling by Jon Langmead (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California by Arthur Quinn (BOOK)

•The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael Cook (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, Third Edition by Aidan Nichols (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309-1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society by Joëlle Rollo-Koster (BOOK | KINDLE)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Nov 18, 2024

It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organisation would no longer be posting on X. “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse”.

Other users have followed suit, with an exodus of accounts from X to Bluesky, a social media platform that resembles in style the pre-Musk Twitter. Taylor Swift fans are flocking in their thousands and former CNN anchor Don Lemon posted a lengthy statement outlining his own reasons for relocating. The official account of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Museum posted a similar statement, which has led to candlelit vigils and a mass outpouring of public grief.

After the Guardian’s announcement, many users were quick to point out that misinformation, far from being the publication’s chief concern, appears to be its speciality. Since Musk has introduced “community notes” to X, journalists who post falsehoods or misleading articles have quickly been corrected. Inevitably, the Guardian has been slapped with community notes on numerous occasions, which might help explain its decision to withdraw. On its website, the Guardian proudly boasts that it “delivers fearless, investigative journalism — giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account”. But whether its executives admit it or not, the publication has developed a reputation for extreme ideological bias.

The frequent “community-noting” on X suggests that this reputation is not unfounded. For instance, when the Guardian posted a piece entitled “England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread?”, notes were quickly added to provide links to the various articles in which the Guardian has asserted that “two-tier policing” based on race and sexuality is rife. When it published an article entitled “How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?”, the community notes quickly explained that the victim had not merely been smacked, but had suffered extreme beatings and multiple forms of torture. All such hideous acts are, of course, already illegal.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that ideology always fails because once its inherent “falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain”. Those currently scurrying away from X are effectively retreating from the battlefield of ideas envisaged by John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644) in which Truth and Falsehood are seen as antagonists. “Let her and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

I was the subject of the Guardian’s misinformation tactics only the other week. Reporting on a short course on the “woke” movement that I will soon be teaching at the New College of Florida, the Guardian described me as a “controversial British media personality and culture warrior”. It is of course entirely predictable that culture warriors would brand their critics as “culture warriors”, but quite how my consistent defence of liberal values is “controversial” is anyone’s guess.

The article’s author, Jason Wilson, went on to claim that I am guilty of “courting rightwing opinion” because I have been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. I have also appeared on shows hosted by Left-wing commentators such as Hugo Rifkind and George Galloway, but thus far I have not been accused of “courting leftwing opinion”. Perhaps Wilson is simply unfamiliar with the concept of engaging in dialogue with people of opposing views?

Wilson further claimed that the course at the New College of Florida had been “reinstated”, which is odd given that it had never been cancelled in the first place. But the most egregious factual inaccuracy came when Wilson, in pointing out that I have written for Spiked, described the magazine as “hard-right”. Spiked began its existence as Living Marxism, and has consistently supported free speech, the values of democracy and liberal immigration policies, while vehemently opposing all forms of racism and white nationalism. Mislabelling Spiked as “hard-right” is either outright dishonesty or staggering ignorance. It’s what happens when journalistic standards are subordinated to propaganda.

The crowning moment of Wilson’s inadvertent self-satire was when he admitted, in light of my forthcoming course on the “woke movement”, that he had been actively searching for non-profit organisations which might qualify as members. He writes — and I am not making this up — “The Guardian’s search of IRS non-profit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word ‘woke’ in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.” Wilson genuinely seems to believe that one can only subscribe to an ideology if it is registered with the government and has applied for tax exemptions. This is a species of literal-mindedness so colossal that it must surely be eligible for some kind of award.

On reflection, I got off lightly. A far more egregious example of the Guardian’s mendacity was the controversy over the Wi Spa in Los Angeles in 2021. A video of a woman who calls herself “CubanaAngel” on Instagram was posted online, in which she could be seen complaining to the staff about a naked man in the women’s jacuzzi area. The man in question, Darren Agee Merager, was a registered sex offender with previous convictions for indecent exposure, and it was alleged that the complainant at the Wi Spa had seen him semi-erect. “So it’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section and show his penis around the other women, young little girls — underage — in your spa?” she had said to staff, who defended his right to be there on the grounds of self-identification.

Josephine Bartosch outlined the sequence of events in an article for The Critic. After the video went viral, protests outside the spa were organised by women’s rights campaigners. These were quickly smeared as “far right” and mobbed by so-called “anti-fascist” protesters. The Guardian, having spent years promoting the notion that womanhood is an identity category rather than a biological reality, and having faced allegations of driving female journalists from its staff for their gender-critical views, then produced two articles in quick succession that implied CubanaAngel’s complaints were a hoax. The writers claimed that the incident “provided clear evidence of the links between anti-trans and far-right movements”, while Guardian columnist Owen Jones called the entire incident a “campaign of lies”.

Even when it emerged that Merager had been charged for indecent exposure at the Wi Spa, the Guardian continued to conflate the female protesters with the far-Right agitators who had turned up to exploit the situation. As Bartosch puts it, “For all the Guardian’s handwringing about #metoo, when it comes to believing the women who complained about Merager’s crime, rather than ‘giving a voice to the powerless’ they pretended his victims didn’t exist. Women like CubanaAngel are ideological inconveniences.”

The combination of Musk’s successful Twitter bid and a forthcoming second term for Donald Tru.mp has curdled many once sensible minds. Those who were comfortable with the echo chamber that Twitter had formerly established, where users were routinely banned for pointing out that no human being has ever changed sex, are now looking for an alternative. It is the psychological equivalent of the “safe space” mentality, one which led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to establish a “Self-Care Suite” after Tru.mp’s victory. Here students could isolate themselves and process their trauma by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies.

And now we have the digital milk and cookies of Bluesky, where users can be shielded from the disorientation that occurs where plurality of opinion is permitted. Such online echo chambers are of course largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years, and also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way. While it is true that Musk has reinstated accounts on X that post some genuinely objectionable material, this is the price one pays for an open marketplace of ideas.

This desire to avoid any challenges to one’s ideological certainties is becoming more widespread, and there is a sense in which we are entering a new phase in the culture war. I am not celebrating the departure of activists to Bluesky, because I would rather hear their views and see them participate in these important debates. By insulating themselves from criticism, and seeking platforms where their misrepresentations will not be flagged, the Guardian and its ilk are doing themselves no favours. If they are serious about their goals, they should reconsider their resolution to speak only to those who will unquestioningly cheer them on. Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.

--

[k1spiegel]

[hiswrlds]

Longclaw is canon to this blog actually

[drsonnet]

Why aren’t foreign media allowed into Gaza?

 Illustration: Fiona Katauskas/The Guardian