#Recruitment At Ngo

[immaculatasknight]

Criminal commonwealth

[ficisid]

Indevjobs Provides Information on Jobs in NGOs, International Development Sector, and UN Agency. Job Seeker and Consultant can upload their profile in the portal. It also has Article on Career in Development Sector. Information on Funding Opportunity is one of the Unique Service.

[current24news]

Oxfam jobs opportunity, salary more than 18 lakhs per annum

Oxfam jobs opportunity, salary more than 18 lakhs per annum

Oxfam jobs opportunity, salary more than 18 lakhs per year International charity organization Oxfam has published a notification for the recruitment of workers in Bangladesh. The company will hire employees in the management team in Bangladesh. Interested applicants need to follow thru online. Also Read: Job opportunities under the Ministry of religion BD Post Name: Grant, Compliance & Risk…

[reality-detective]

Greg Reese Report 👇

Sweeping Plan for Global Censorship Exposed. How the US government recruited a web of NGOs and private individuals to censor and subvert the American people. 🤔

[readingsquotes]

"When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

...Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

..

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.

...

Hacked emails and monitored calls

Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.

Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”. ......

One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.

Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.

“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”

...

Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.

They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded.

[eretzyisrael]

BY PARK MACDOUGALD

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

WOL’s role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) “sister,” NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

[thepoliticalvulcan]

Harris and Legitimacy: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

A lot of this is inspired by comments made by people I respect, both in my personal life such as those made by a good friend over dinner who is an avowed leftist, as well as some public-ish figures like Justin Robert Young of Politics! Politics! Politics! and Jennifer Briney of Congressional Dish. Two thinkers I have immense respect for but I think have made some lame takes about Harris being "coronated."

Your problem with Kamala Harris is structural not personal.

Warning: This gets windy. It clocked in at about 3100 words and 7 pages in a Google doc.

TL/DR: We have a complexity and opacity problem when it comes to how elections work and I don't actually know what we should do or expect when a Presidential nominee drops out in July, but for all sorts of reasons a Primary "do over" is unrealistic and massively problematic. Which is why candidates who are likely to drop out in July because they're increasingly incapable of campaigning and deeply unpopular shouldn't run in the first place because once they run, there's actually no good way to stop them if they have an incumbency advantage. There's no "remove your candidate before its a problem" button under breakable glass, and I don't know how we'd build such a button into the system in a way that wouldn't feel more undemocratic.

I do not love the way that Harris became the nominee. However, I don’t love it not because I think it's wholly illegitimate or undemocratic. Her not having directly faced voters in a primary at the top of the ticket is not wholly undemocratic.

No, not because of the super lame excuse that she was on the ticket as VP.

That’s why she’s the legitimate nominee from a legal and party rules standpoint. Because party rules and election laws ensured that it couldn’t play out any other way.

At least not without Biden having dropped out much, much earlier.

The principle reason for this is actually fairly reasonable - if you accept our electoral machinery “as is” which I do not encourage you to do so but you go to war with the electoral process you have not the electoral process you want. We absolutely should debate reforms after this cycle because what Biden did was undemocratic and unconscionable - it's just that Kamala Harris should not be punished for accepting reality as it is rather than waving a wand and remaking the entire process to be more in keeping with what you or I or Ezra Klein would want.

The principal reason that it had to be Harris is that there is no ironclad, bad faith actor resistant mechanism to spin up a brand new primary election after one is already essentially complete. 

The reason for this is two fold. First is that because this is a state by state process rather than a national one, each state sets conditions for qualifying to be on the ballot and sets deadlines for fulfilling those conditions so there is adequate time to plan the election: recruit and train staff who run the voting sites, print ballots, make sure voting machines are working properly - and whatever else.

There are 50 Democratic Primaries, not 1 and Democratic Party rules can’t legally bind actual lawmakers

This is where it gets weird! Because we are told the parties are essentially NGOs - private clubs - that make their own rules for who gets to be a candidate or not and when primaries are even held. 

Which is true! 

Sort of. 

State elected officials are not beholden to the parties and its state governments who are actually operating the voting process itself. This how you get situations like New Hampshire very nearly not having its delegates seated at the convention because it held its primary election earlier than the position in the schedule dictated by the Democratic National Committee. 

So the Democratic National Committee attempted to force New Hampshire to vote later while New Hampshire has a state law mandating that it have the first primary election. Which the state technically has the right to do because the DNC is not actually a federal authority, it’s a private organization remember? But the DNC also threatened to refuse to allow New Hampshire’s votes to count since the DNC decides how to pick its candidates for President.

Now this story has a happy ending because New Hampshire’s delegates were seated, but only after the New Hampshire state Democratic Party (a legally autonomous but theoretically subordinate entity to the Democratic national party) held its own separate vote later in the election cycle which did count. Incidentally Joe Biden was the only one on the ballot. 

So technically because it felt it should have more authority than a state elected government, the Democratic National Party caused New Hampshire to run an election that didn’t actually count in an act of ill advised pettiness and micromanagement (and in what was widely assessed to be an attempt to minimize the chances of any of Biden’s challengers from getting any momentum by having the first few elections in states where Biden was unpopular with Democrats - see also the saga of Michigan & Uncommitted.)

Manufacturing Irregularity and Illegitimacy

Now I know what you’re saying, how does this anecdote help the argument that Harris’ candidacy isn’t undemocratic and illegitimate?

It sort of doesn’t, but I also want you to understand from a practical standpoint the problems that Biden caused by running again and then waiting practically until it was almost impossible for him to get his name off the ballot to drop out. The complexity and dubiousness of the primary process to begin with is why the only smooth and legally sound transition was to Harris.

The Democratic National Party could not force New Hampshire’s Republican controlled legislature to change its law requiring New Hampshire to hold its election first in any Presidential primary election. I am not defending the DNC’s attempt to threaten a state government into obeying its election calendar. I’m also not defending the New Hampshire legislature and its quest to go first come hell or highwater.

But do you think New Hampshire and other states would acquiesce to holding a “do over” primary for the Democrats? Do you think maybe they might engage in some legal chicanery? 

Let's say Republican controlled states refuse to allow a “do over” and the state parties hold privately funded and organized contests like New Hampshire did to get its delegates back. Might this provoke legal wrangling over whether the new nominee should be allowed ballot access to the general election? 

I’m not personally aware of any laws stating that the winner of a primary election in any particular state or nationally has to be the person who goes on the ballot for that party in the general election - that would be silly for a lot of reasons. Which is why Harris is able to become the new Democratic party nominee in the first place. Yet it's not inconceivable that some states might rush to try to change their election laws in the event of a more chaotic process. 

There were threats made and speculation of that happening even with Harris taking over as candidate. These threats ultimately don't seem to have manifested real world action, but don’t forget that in 2020 Trump went to court almost 80 times to dispute this or that aspect of the election process. It's now in our culture that the law is a tool you can wield to try to stop election results you don’t like or, failing that, poison the results so that while the election result may be honored legally, tens of millions of people wind up feeling like something was wrong.

Again, I am not defending our election methods, I am describing the context in which candidates are selected.

Trying to defend elections and voters against fraud

The second reason that there is no mechanism for a primary election “do over” is money. As I mentioned, the Democratic Party kinda, sorta jerked around New Hampshire voters and the state government. It engaged in a game of chicken wherein if New Hampshire’s Republican controlled legislature didn’t change its laws to delete the requirement that it go first in any Presidential Primary, then the delegates from that election wouldn’t be permitted to cast New Hampshire’s votes. Paid election workers had to be paid for their efforts, ballots had to be printed, voters had to vote. Time, effort, and money was expended for a contest that didn’t count.

Now imagine asking everyone to do it again.

What should have happened to the money the Biden - Harris campaign raised when Biden suspended his campaign is probably the critical question that I would pose to people who are cranky about Harris being “annointed.”

According to Forbes this is the scenario: 

Harris can use the money because she is part of the campaign. The VP can use the money if the President steps aside. There’s paperwork involved.

Now if being the VP should be disqualifying for automatically getting the money and the campaign machinery, this is absolutely a conversation we can have! 

Now worthwhile questions to ponder though are should this actually be disqualifying or should we care more about who the VP nominee is? Because we are technically voting both for a candidate and the person who will step in if, after winning, the President dies, is incapacitated, or resigns because of some sort of insurmountable scandal. All of which have historical precedents. Although it's possible Nixon will be the last President ever to resign because they committed what are empirically understood to be crimes and the general public was not okay with this.

If we think that the VP pick shouldn’t inherit the campaign operation and money if the Presidential nominee simply drops out rather than drops dead (and maybe not even then) then we do have to have the conversation of what happens to the money and the campaign operation? If the campaign has to be shut down and the balance of the money refunded to donors, then are we in effect handing the election to the opponent of the ex-nominee if this is a major party candidate we are talking about?

I think the argument made by many pundits in March of 2024 when Ezra Klein became the most prominent voice calling for Biden to drop out and the Dems to hold a modified Primary is that “no, the penalty from having to dismantle and rebuild the election machine around a new person is outweighed by lots of factors: 

The media taking to novelty and drama like catnip. 

The attention economy running wild. 

And what I think we can now describe as a “sugar high” that comes from replacing a certain to fail candidate with someone who, while not descended from heaven free of scandal or questionable policy stances and affectations, at least represents a different set of pros and cons and changes how we talk about the issues and candidates.

But that was also March. March!

Biden waited to drop out until July. When all of the Primaries had been held, all of the delegates awarded, and he was cruising to the nomination more or less solely on the basis that nobody who could give him a serious fight was willing to risk throwing down with the sitting President in a year where said President was up against Trump. If Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee, all bets are off. The Primary might have been a blood sport with Mitt Romney on the opposing side, but with Trump as the presumed nominee the risk aversion among Democrats was incredible and tragic to behold.

But it was also their risk to not take. You can’t just make people who could theoretically give the incumbent President a serious fight actually do it. And the rub is that I don’t know how to rejigger any sort of laws or formal Democratic party processes to make it so that running and losing is consequence free. 

I don’t know how to encourage more competitive elections when there’s an incumbent, other than a political culture that is A LOT thicker skinned and doesn’t gripe perpetually about being robbed when voters don’t do what they want. Why yes I am still irritated by a conversation with a friend who simultaneously thinks Harris is illegitimate because “nobody voted for her” but still to this day thinks it would be fine if a candidate won a primary with less than a majority because the liberals collectively had more votes overall but were splitting them too narrowly and that it was dirty pool for them to drop out and consolidate the vote.

Dropping out in July

So what do you do if the presumed nominee who (technically) won an (uncompetitive) primary in July?

In an ideal world the candidate should have seen the writing on the wall and never ran.

Failing that, they should have dropped out before the voting started.

But if they don’t?

There is no explicit mechanism to force someone out of the race before it’s started. There are all sorts of shenanigans that can be played with funding opponents, withholding funds, creating blacklists of people who aren’t allowed to work on campaigns if they work for person XYZ (ask AOC about the DNC kneecapping candidates who primary incumbents by trying to scare campaign staffers with “you’ll never work in this town again.” It was a whole thing.)

Despite the presumption of being dastardly oligarchs unaccountable to voters who just do what they want, the DNC actually can’t keep people from running as Democrats. Hell, RFK Jr. started as a Democrat. Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Manchin, and Krysten Sinema all have run as Democrats. Anybody can be a Democrat if they check the right box on a form. 

Same with the Republicans. The Republican establishment pulled every lever they had to try to stop Trump from being the nominee in 2016, but they didn’t have a big red button that says “you’re not a candidate anymore. Kick rocks” if that person can pull together the money, attention, and votes to be a viable candidate in the face of establishment opposition.

This is, incidentally, why the Dems originally wanted superdelegates: to override the voters if there were a Trumpian scenario where a candidate had less than a majority of the overall votes cast but the other candidates were splitting the opposition vote instead of consolidating around a candidate who would be palatable to the establishment, if not one of them.

Why Biden couldn’t give the money to someone else.

That Biden can’t give the money to another candidate, at least not in total, and has to donate it either to the national committee or refund it, is reasonably well discussed in the media. Why he couldn’t is less well discussed.

Because I haven’t seen it discussed, this is where I’m going to get very speculative.

I think it's a check against fraud. I think it may even be a check against the very thing people are accusing Biden and the Democrats of doing: pulling a fast one and changing candidates at the last minute. Except she was, for lack of a better word, Biden’s legal beneficiary should he decide he as an individual was out of the campaign.

But you could easily imagine a scenario much like the Dem 2020 Primary or the GOP 2016 Primary where, surprise! All the very popular but not popular enough candidates drop out and give not only their endorsements, but all of their money and campaign staff to their preferred candidate. We’d definitely be living in a different world if all the establishment Republicans had been able to transfer their cash and organizations to Mitt Romney.

I know a lot of people who may very well have walked away from electoralism entirely and never voted again if Klobuchar, Buttigieg et al. had been able to not just suspend their campaigns and clear the center left lane for Biden but also directly give him all of the money they’d raised.

Essentially what I’m talking about is longshots and badfaith candidates entering a race largely just to raise money, only to funnel it to another person late in the game.

Another possibility is out and out grifters. Which we already kind of know this happens, but in an exquisitely legal way that still sometimes manages to trip up otherwise very competent candidates who are taking advantage of their campaign donations to live a little more opulently and provide huge paydays for their friends and family. But as is, they have to spend the money and they have to spend it in ways that can be scrutinized by the Federal Electoral Commission. They can spend profligately but they have to save the receipts.

What they can’t do is just brazenly take the money and run.

Probably.

It’s not entirely clear to me to what degree if any there is a firewall between Trump’s re-election fund and Trump’s legal defense fund. There may be some sketchy legalese involved.

So by forcing Biden to either 1. Give the money to Harris. 2. Give the money to the DNC. 3. Refund the money; it keeps him somewhat above board and it minimizes the potential for an insincere grifter to fundraise, quit, and then use the money for whatever.

So where does that leave us?

I’m actually a bit at a loss for how to prevent another scenario like Biden dropping out in friggin’ July. This is if not literally than essentially unprecedented.

At the risk of repeating myself, ideally he should have never run again. I would hope that a future President facing dire prospects would not monopolize time and money this way or play stupid games with the lives of hundreds of millions of people. I would expect there would be pressure on such a hypothetical President not to do so. Yet I cannot rule out family and staffers with careers on the line gaslighting an increasingly out of touch or deeply arrogant President.

In an election year where until just two months ago now, both presumptive nominees of their Parties were the oldest candidates ever AND where one was nearly assassinated, we should take more care to scrutinize who is the VP pick. Because we are not just voting for President, we are voting for the backup President.

As for Harris inheriting all of this mess in July, I don’t love the circumstances, but at the same time I think we need to be much more introspective about Primaries - how they’re run, what they mean, the complicated dance between the national parties who technically have no direct legal authority over states and the states who can be coerced but not directly cowed by parties if the states feel like being obstreperous like New Hampshire. 

There’s all sorts of pain points that the Republicans may try to attack to sabotage the legally very smooth ascension of Harris to being the Presidential nominee, especially if it looks like she’s going to win. Those pain points and more would have been wielded against someone wholly separate from the Biden - Harris campaign as a legal matter. In the very best scenario, we are looking at an election where the Republicans will spend the next four years waving around their failed legal challenges like OJ Simpson’s bloody glove and creating a miasma of illegitimacy and rage around Harris’ presidency.

We have a complexity and an opacity problem when it comes to the election process. It's taken me too dang many words to explain up to this point in what I hope is plain enough English which makes it very prone to sabotage and very difficult for the average person to scrutinize carefully. And that is how you end up with a narrative in which Harris’ candidacy is undemocratic and illegitimate. But if it is, and I’m not actually saying it's not, then we should indict the system and ponder how to improve its ability to reliably serve up candidates who are selected democratically and are rich in legitimacy.

[sybaritick]

me and Omii's pretentious designer breed was done by an indie shop and it's basically an open secret they don't follow the draconian regulations on what specific genes they're allowed to modify, so along with her being a savannah cat as the breed base-- what, of course I know it's unethical as a domestic cat, we're talking about a catgirl! She's 99.5% genetically human!-- anyway, they messed around with some experimental changes that aren't guaranteed and she's a full head taller than either of us, at least 6'1", which is hot but occasionally impractical. techs also told me to quit overfeeding her and then tried telling Omii but really it's a genetic thing, I'm not refusing if she asks! She's not even 300lb iirc. (I say iirc like I don't obviously know. 291. But again she's tall and her most recent blood test looked good).

Anyway I totally shouldn't talk about this here but some catfolk protection NGO sent us one of those lawyer threat form letters because of the non-domestic feline intermixture and some unapproved genemods the shop did for us for some neuro and behavioral stuff. I chucked the first one assuming they weren't serious and they sent another that seems a little more concerning but I doubt they'll really do anything. Anything the shop did is gonna get approved in another 5 years I'm sure and if they don't it's because of the hybrid personhood lobby as usual. They sent a letter here addressed to her too, which is hilarious, but obviously I just kept it. I mean she'd understand it if she read it but I don't think she would really get the extent to which it's pure propaganda. They wanna recruit these hybrids as easily-led sympathetic mouthpieces to parrot their own viewpoint-- you know how it is. She deserves better than being used as somebody's pawn.

[mariacallous]

In the midst of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian children in occupied areas are facing an impossible choice: dying from military strikes or being conscripted to the Russian army after turning 18, head of the Crimean Human Rights Group Olha Skrypnyk said during the “Stolen Childhood” conference in Kyiv.

Skrypnyk stressed the importance of halting these abuses, labeling Russia’s actions as international crimes. Specifically, she condemned the propaganda aimed at indoctrinating children to serve in the Russian military, a clear violation of the Geneva Convention that prohibits such actions by an aggressor state.

New Russification wave

The United Nations reports that since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, around 2.8 million Ukrainians have been deported, including potentially 200–300 thousand children.

The Ukrainian government and NGOs believe the occupiers aim to erase the children’s Ukrainian identity and assimilate them to mitigate Russia’s demographic crisis. Additionally, there’s a significant effort to militarize these children, preparing them as future combatants against Ukraine.

Russian authorities actively use education and propaganda to justify their invasion and recruit minors into organizations like Yunarmiya, effectively grooming them as future soldiers for the Kremlin.

Crimea has become a focal point for these illegal practices, with children being particularly affected by efforts at militarization, deportations, and political persecution. “We've documented these events and proven a systematic approach by the Russian Federation to militarize children, making them a resource for their war efforts,” Skrypnyk pointed out.

The human impact

The situation has escalated to the point where Russian authorities have officially acknowledged their war against Ukraine, highlighting the need for human resources, particularly from occupied territories.

“This constitutes a large-scale international crime, demanding accountability,” Skrypnyk asserted.

The plight of Ukrainian children underlines the grave human impact of the conflict and the imperative for international action.

[artsy-hobbitses]

Wait, what is the advertising and pr like on the autobot side of things.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the autobots did charity as well.

That, and they film their table top rpg events live and request donations to some organizations or the autobot cause.

Who even orchestrates the advertising and pr for the autobots? Is it blaster?

Less propaganda (they’re not in the business of conquering territories), more PSAs.

There is some degree of recruitment stuff going on of course, but it tends to have the flavour of signing up for Docs Without Borders or an international NGO—it’s less ‘elite’/militarised than ‘Con propaganda and more altruistic.

While they don’t have ‘territories’, they do have outposts constructed in areas free of Con and Functionist grip, and often train people there/offer backup to help ensure their borders remain free. The idea is to let them rebuild on their own terms for their own people on the foundation that freedom is the right of all.

You’ll find care packages with booklets for war refugees/cold constructs kind of like 101 on agencies that can help them, the rights they have, and where to go for aid and the type of aid they are are eligible for.

There’s also lots of posters combating Beastman and Manual Class stigma, and breaking down how ridiculous it is to adopt the same caste system a bunch of fucking coloniser space squids first used to divide them up into slaves.

Charity work and volunteerism is very much a thing they do as well, though to a slightly smaller scale than the Cons because their funds are sort of limited and they’re just generally a smaller team (their biggest benefactor is Mirage and potentially Tracks) with less manpower. So yes the Tabletop RPG thing and music jam sessions to help raise funds is something that happens quite often.

Something that sort of becomes unexpectedly popular here is actually OP reading (think of it like Henry Cavill reading the Witcher books) and discussing books with the audience after. Sometimes he’ll take book requests so there’s a pretty large online (and on radio for those with no Net access, if you can tap in to Blaster’s channel) book club for the book of the month (there will be people saying his voice reading to them is like a very cozy ASMR). This is also novel because a lot of Manual classes especially did not have access to books outside of their class specification, and in lacking resources to get these books to all of them physically, this is how OP chooses to break that barrier/share the joy and knowledge from them with a worldwide audience regardless of caste. It’s why his moniker as The Librarian sticks in an affectionate manner for a lot of people (sometimes Megs listens in too on particularly lonely nights, though you could never pry that out of him)

OP, Mirage, Jazz and Blaster usually oversee the public relations work they do as it’s mostly a combined effort that gets input from everyone.

[re4make]

She is an employee of TerraSave, an NGO that provides relief for victims of bio-terrorism and drugs. Her brother Chris taught her self-defense skills, and after escaping from Raccoon City, she acquired various combat techniques. She has the same headstrong personality as her older brother, but she has a kind heart and is devoted to the weak. Claire and Leon have fought together against bio-terrorism and are comrades-in-arms.

-- Claire Redfield Character Bio, Biohazard: Death Island

On his first day of assignment to the Raccoon City Police Department, he was caught up in a biohazard outbreak and bravely did his best to rescue the survivors. He was later recruited as a government agent and joined the DSO, an organization under the direct control of the President of the United States, where he is engaged in daily top-secret missions. He is an excellent survivor and possesses both high physical ability and good judgment. He has earned the President's trust through his successful rescue of President Graham's daughter, Ashley, who was kidnapped in the past.

-- Leon S. Kennedy Character Bio, Biohazard: Death Island

[honesty-my-policy]

some fresh resources (05/24/24)

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) Hamas Terrorists Attack Kerem Shalom Aid Crossing for Fourth Time in MayEgyptian Blockade of Aid to Gaza Earns Rebuke from U.S.Terrorist Rockets Discovered Next to Gaza’s Border With Egypt Harrowing Footage Released of Female IDF Soldiers in Hamas Captivity FDD VISUALS IRAN-BACKED WEST BANK CHAOS IRAN AND ITS NETWORK OF NINETEEN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS ON ISRAEL’S BORDERS MAPPING TERRORISM IN THE WEST BANK

HonestReporting Why Won’t Media Give a Platform to Gazans Who Oppose Hamas? Campus Journalism Fueling the Next Generation of Anti-Israel Media Media Ignore Quietly-Revised UN Figures of Hamas-Reported Civilian Deaths Media Falsely Blame Israel for Rejecting Hamas’ Ceasefire “Proposal”

UNWatch UNRWA staff stealing and selling humanitarian aid, Gazans report ICRC Head of Office posts Hamas propaganda, says “f*** neutrality” in leaked Facebook postsUNRWA Attacks Those Who Warn Of Staff Support For TerrorismUN Watch Warned UNRWA About Staff Support for Terror Since 2015 NGO Monitor (really good stuff here) See No Evil: NGOs Turn Terrorists into Civilians in 2021 Gaza Conflict NGO Monitor research has identified 50 incidents in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives killed in Gaza were falsely labeled by NGOs as civilian casualties, or in which civilians killed by Hamas were implicitly attributed to Israel. (more if you scroll down) Excuse and Disregard: Palestinian NGOs on Teens’ Involvement in Terror Attacks and Violent Clashes Behind the ICC Prosecutor’s Narrative: The NGOs that Pushed the “Starvation” Libel in October The NGO Network Orchestrating Antisemitic Incitement on American Campuses EU-Supported Palestinian NGOs and the October 7th Hamas Massacre Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) MEMRI Executive Director Of 'American Muslims For Palestine' Osama Abuirshaid At George Washington University Encampment: We Will Take Back America, Just Like We Will Take Back Palestine; You Will Be The Past, We Will Be The Future Hizbullah-Affiliated Lebanese Academic Sadek Al-Naboulsi: Hitler Recruited Child Soldiers, So Why Shouldn't We? There Is Nothing Shameful About Raising Children On The Principle Of Sacrificing One's Life Mahmoud Habbash, Advisor To Palestinian President Abbas: Without A Solution To The Palestinian Issue, October 7 Will Be Repeated 100 Times; Hamas Derailed Us From The Path To Statehood Lebanese Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt: October 7 Was A Great Moment In The History Of The Arab-Israeli Conflict; Hizbullah Is Defending Lebanon Against Its Historic Enemy Fmr. President Of Jordanian Medical Association Dr. Tareq Tahboub: 90% Of The Content On TikTok Is Pro-Palestinian; Blonde, Tattooed European And American Girls Are Converting To Islam

[yugotrash]

Why do you think homophobia is systematically unsolvable?

this would take a lot more space but i'll try to be brief. i'll begin by acknowledging that here i primarily have my own country in the capitalist (semi-)periphery and male homosexuals in mind, since i don't believe in a sex-neutral homophobia (lesbophobia is enmeshed with misogyny much more than anti-homosexual sentiment).

"Solving" homophobia, that is the elimination of negative societal attitudes towards homosexuals, would require constant and consistent political action in changing the attitude of the vast majority of people in a given society. Such action would require homosexuals as some kind of collective political subject. However, homosexuals are structurally incapable of organising in a way that is required by such a bottom up campaign. This is due to several reasons:

Homosexuals are dispersed randomly across space, race, class, age and sex, to the degree that their common sexual orientation cannot bridge. Solidarity along some of these other lines will invariably carry more weight.

Homosexuals are a tiny minority of the population. This minority has no capability to disrupt society (cannot withhold labour or reproductive function, for example), and society would continue to exist smoothly if they were all to vanish. They also cannot engage in separatism both because of aforementioned dispersal and inability to reproduce their own community.

Homosexuals' half-hidden existence, in which they must explicitly "come out" to people around them to be recognised as such and experience direct pushback means that, for reasons of safety and convenience, an even tinier part of an already tiny minority can "afford" to be openly homosexual at all times - this is deadly to any attempt to recruit for a grassroots cause.

Homosexuals are severely limited in their ability to develop the kind of consciousness that has shaped mass liberation movements. They are deeply invested in woman-hating modes of thought and behaviour, queer or otherwise, and enough frank analysis would lead to them realising that they are not the protagonists of their own liberation, as homophobia is a byproduct of the rigid system of sex roles, which women are the only ones capable of abolishing.

The problem of consciousness continues if you factor in rampant mental illness, social alienation and an ever-present conviction, whether articulated positively or not, that the homosexual is so far removed in his experience from anyone else in the world that basically no real alliances with other social groups are possible, and such a small minority without such an alliance is permanently impotent.

The nigh-total domination of genderism and queer politics among the homosexuals has ensured that large numbers of that miniscule number that can "afford" political action is deeply invested in essentially homophobic politics. In Western societies, this kind of new homophobia is fast becoming not only the gay orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy of general political discourse as well.

Due to political developments since the 1960s and the domination of Western institutions globally since the 1990s, homosexuals are largely incapable or unwilling to articulate their own positions outside the dominant liberal orthodoxy - western governments and NGOs fund and maintain loyal proxies in the rest of the world who largely hold monopolies on homosexual-related topics in public discourse in their respective countries. By virtue of their resources and protections, these proxies effectively position themselves as representatives of (among others) sexual minorities both to the government/public and to their country's homosexuals as well, regardless of how little they actually represent their interests. There is virtually no prospect of breaking this stranglehold by committed groups of dissenting homosexuals due to factors listed above.

Although I consider homophobia to be mostly derivative of sex roles and failure to adhere to them, I'm increasingly convinced there is also an irrational, organic or non-learned element, a kind of visceral revulsion the heterosexuals feel towards homosexuals that may be impossible to ever get rid of.

All in all, my conclusion is that you have to look truth in the face and realize that if you're a gay man, nothing short of a radical feminist revolution will really remove the problems you face as a homosexual, and that in the meantime all you can do is lend your support to feminists, find local and small-scale ways to soothe those aspects of homophobia that hit you hardest with support of your immediate community, make gay friends you can actually relate to and look around for more productive standpoints you can occupy towards society other than your sexual orientation. Kill the desire to center your entire experience around being gay, as you'll eventually run into a lot of dead-ends otherwise.

[darkeagleruins]

TERROR: The occupation of college campuses across the US is a well organized and funded operation led by Soros-backed groups including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). The Soros-backed NGOs pay outside agitators $7800 and campus activists $3600 each. Half of the violent protestors who have been arrested nationally are not students but NGO affiliated agitators. Hamas is an internationally recognized terror group and with the help of these NGOs it is recruiting and radicalizing thousands of students across the country.

[mariacallous]

Russia’s military is recruiting children and teens in occupied territories of Ukraine into its Young Army program. This seeks to brainwash, militarize, and even force them into contributing to the Russian war effort against their own country, according to non-governmental organizations monitoring the group’s activities.

Through social media posts and sources on the ground in occupied regions, the NGOs have tracked the formation of the militarized children’s program, which they fear is intended to instill pro-war rhetoric into the minds of Russia’s youngest victims, and strip them of their Ukrainian identity. The NGOs believe that the invading country is preparing Ukrainian children in occupied areas for a future career in the Kremlin’s military, bringing an initiative that began seven years ago to the frontlines of the war.

Evidence gathered by Ukrainian groups suggests that the children are pressured to join the Young Army, where they are taught effectively to become Russians. Preparations are already underway to design programs to decondition these Ukrainian kids if the military is ever able to recapture the occupied territories from Russian control.

The Young Army’s Beginning

Formed in 2016 by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Young Army is a militarized organization to prepare children for careers in state and military apparatus. Over the last seven years, the Young Army has expanded throughout the Russian Federation and the regions of Ukraine it has occupied since 2014—Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

Through an immersive program that includes sleepaway camps, military combat training sessions, and annual competitions, the Young Army has created a generation of children and teenagers willing to risk their lives to defend their motherland. The Young Army has created centers for after-school activities, where children could meet with friends in one location, play games, and at the same time be fed governmental propaganda through interactive games and lessons. Activities mentioned in a 2021 magazine created by the Young Army include teenage girls competing in rowboat sports on a lake and homeland defense training where teenage soldiers participate in paratrooper drills. There are also photos of boys of around 8 years old holding puppies up to their chests and smiling for the camera.

“Before the invasion, the main purpose they wrote on their website is that it is patriotic education,” Crimea SOS co-coordinator Sabina Iliasov told The Daily Beast.“They talked about family, values, patriotism, what does it mean to be a patriotic citizen of your country, what are the good human features that you need to defend your country—this value that Russia and previously the Soviet Union stand for.”

No Way Out

The narrative of the Young Army changed after Russia invaded Ukraine. For the last 18 months, the group has focused on praising Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion and claims that the country is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. According to Iliasov, the message of the Young Army shifted and Ukraine turned into Russia’s number one enemy.

“They started to compare World War II and the special military operation, saying, ‘You see, Ukraine is our enemy,’” Iliasov said.

“In that way, they try to impose that Russian identity, ideas of enemies, and good Russian policy against almost the whole world. That Ukraine is the first enemy, and other countries, the European countries and especially the U.S., all of them are enemies,” she added.

As the war has continued, Crimea SOS has been in contact with sources who have stayed in the peninsula and helped them collect information on the Young Army. They paint a picture for the NGO that is more grim than originally thought, with entire families being drawn into supporting the war, and Young Army members and their parents creating supply boxes for Russian soldiers fighting on the frontlines.

Supplies for the invaders are collected in occupied areas like the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and Crimea, and include much-needed supplies for the winter like warm clothes, hygiene products, and medicines, as well as juice boxes as a treat. In a post on Telegram, the Russian-backed “Kherson News” channel wrote that the humanitarian aid boxes are collected from the distribution sites and “Delivered by young soldiers and distributed to Russian servicemen in cooperation with their Kherson comrades.”

The boxes also included letters of support from Young Army children to Russian soldiers, what the Telegram channel adds is “according to the military, there is no greater support than children’s belief in victory over the common enemy.”

Many of these children are Ukrainians.

The Young Army boasts that it has attracted over 1 million children into its 89 centers and that thousands of members live in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, a number that Iliasov believes includes some who were forced to join the Young Army.

“In Crimea, they create conditions that you are forced to, you have to, it is not a threat, but if your child is not in the Young Army, the attitude towards your child is different from the others,” said Iliasov.

“If you don’t support Russian occupation authority statements, you’re under threat. There were some cases where children made statements like “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine) at school. For children, it’s just for fun, but their parents were asked to come to school and asked why your child would say that,” she added.

Whereas children in Russia apply to be part of the Young Army, Vladyslav Havrylov, researcher and scientific writer for Where Are Our People, told The Daily Beast that he, too, believes Ukrainian children are not given a choice.

“It’s part of Russian propaganda when in Russia you have some chance to apply or to not apply, but if you are a Ukrainian child in occupied territory of Ukraine, you have no choice,” said Havrylov.

“They try to re-educate, and they try to clean the Ukrainian identity of children in occupied territories, and they try to put Russian ideology to them, and it’s a main problem of this process.”

“For now, there’s not a lot of children from new occupied areas participating in this movement, but unfortunately, it is very strong, and we understand that more and more children eventually will be joining this movement,” he added.

Life in Occupied Regions

In November 2022, Kherson, a southern Ukrainian city that had been under Russian occupation since the beginning of the war, was liberated. But although parts of the wider district were freed, others have remained under Russian occupation. The NGO Almenda first discovered that the Young Army had opened a branch in Kherson in November 2022, and on Dec. 29, 2022, the Young Army’s Kherson branch launched its Telegram channel.

Since its formation, the Telegram channel has been flooded with information on the activities of the Young Army in Kherson. Some posts simply show children attending concerts by Russian musicians, but one post shows something darker: five Ukrainian teenagers standing in an open field with Russian soldiers who are showing them how to fire a gun.

The text underneath the post read, “The guys were given instructions on safety precautions, the structure of a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and each one was given cartridges to practice the skill of loading a magazine. After training, they were allowed to practice shooting with single shots and bursts from AKM and RPK at targets at the training ground.”

Almenda also discovered a Telegram channel that claims to belong to the Young Army’s Zaporizhzhia base. The channel was formed two months ago after an “open voting” system approved the council leadership of the regional branch, according to the Telegram channel. Among the activities listed in the channel are images of teenagers loading guns, shooting at targets, and putting on gas masks and personal protection equipment.

Additionally, there are images of four teenagers dressed in military uniforms marching down a street, with two holding a red and green flag that represents the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region and dozens of others standing in line to prepare for the Young Army military sports games. The channel also claims to have held classes titled “Russia is my history, on the day of the Reunification of the Zaporizhzhia region,” where children dressed in the Young Army uniform—a red beret, matching shirt, and khaki pants—smiled for the camera as they learned about Russia’s history.

The evidence Almenda has discovered has led Mariia Sulialina, the head of the NGO, to believe that the Kremlin is seeking to erase the Ukrainian identity from children’s minds and lives and make them believe they are Russian.

“When you teach children how to shoot guns and say who the enemies are, this is a serious thing. The most concerning thing that we see is that they’re trying to create a generation of people who will identify themselves as Russian and will not consider Ukraine a separate nation at all,” she said.

Sulialina added that one of the most challenging aspects of Ukraine’s post-war world, should they win on the battlefield, will be the reintegration of the children who joined the Young Army and were taught to hate their own people.

“We are preparing programs that will help to re-integrate these children because this will not be only an issue of educational gaps which they have because they are now in different educational system and they don’t learn Ukrainian language, Ukrainian history, but this will also be a thing of fighting back propaganda,” said Sulialina.

“They [Russia] are changing the identity of the smallest ones, who are the most vulnerable to this kind of propaganda. They are victims of this system, they are victims of Russian propaganda, and they should not be seen as enemies, even if some of them were militarized and started believing in propaganda,” she added.

[thoughtlessarse]

An information evening in Brussels organised by a Ukrainian army brigade with links to neo-Nazism has been cancelled. The event was scheduled to take place on 28 July in the municipality of Ganshoren. The Third Ukrainian Assault Brigade – connected to the Azov Battalion with neo-Nazi affiliations – is currently touring around Europe, hosting information evenings and encouraging Ukrainians to conscript. The events are organised in tandem with the NGO Promote Ukraine but after venues in Berlin, Hamburg, Rotterdam and now Brussels pulled out, several sessions have been unable to go ahead. "Yesterday evening we found out that the city hall of Ganshoren wanted to cancel the event," Promote Ukraine stated on Thursday. The NGO negotiated with the venue to rectify this but the cancellation went through "at the initiative of the Third Assault Brigade", who reportedly received instructions to do so from President of Ukraine Volodomyr Zelenskyy.

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