#the American government is dangerous and most of the people in it (particularly in the-

[contemplatingoutlander]

That the Editorial Board of the premier U.S. newspaper of record is finally warning about Donald Trump is significant. As such, this is a gift 🎁 link so that those who want to read the entire editorial can do so, even if they don't subscribe to The New York Times. Below are some excerpts:

As president, [Trump] wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term. Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning. Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution. [...] It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.

[See more under the cut.]

There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power. [...] Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties. He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way. [...] Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.

I encourage people to use the above gift link and read the entire article.

[edited]

[halorvic]

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from. Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies. Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID. Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.

[...]

LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising. PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%. LP: What role might COVID play? PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple. Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.

[...]

LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne. PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.

[...]

LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic? PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.

[...]

LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows. PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.

[...]

PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.

[hueberryshortcake]

crawling out of the void to present a rare

HUEBERRY SHORTCAKE DUCK COMIC REACTION

this week it's DANGEROUS DISGUISE which is one of my favorites so you know i had to roll up. let's get going

so this comic was written in the middle of 1950 and is about spies. what else happened in 1950? THIS GUY. pause for hatred:

[for the non-americans because i don't know how common this information is: joseph mccarthy gave a speech in early 1950 that leveraged post-war anxieties about the soviet union's influence on countries weakened by the devastation to turn americans against each other by claiming that secret communist spies were infiltrating the US government. he made up most of this information but it sparked another Red Scare where everyone was particularly afraid of spies and stuff. birth of the cia etc. this has been an off-the-cuff history lesson by caoimhin]

okay anyway so we start out with the ducks having been banished to europe because they were annoying uncle scrooge too much. this is after barks realized that having a rich guy as a plot device to let the ducks explore was, comment dit-on, awesome. so that's Interesting Barks History Fact Number 1. donald says "i wish uncle scrooge would get mad at us more often" . swag

Interesting Barks History Fact Number 2: homeboy got in trouble for having too many humans in this comic. in fact i believe that the duck family are the only non-humans in this one. after this he tends to stick to his "vaguely dog-humanoid things" strategy when he doesn't feel like coming up with unique animal designs. i approve of this because it means i get to go full sonofmegavolt humina humina at some of the women he drew. outside of disney early in his career barks drew some quite racy stuff btw. insert wolf whistle here. ANYWAY.

we get some "gee whiz uncle donald do you think any of these cool europeans are spies" from the boys to which he's like "whatEVER" and theHOLD ON HOLD ON WHA

HIIIIIIII

ok im focused.

i lied. donald gets it

these panels are fire. i just want to take a moment to appreciate this for being hella violent. there's like six guns in one panel guys. everyone say thank you carl. huge fan of cloakan dagger, what a great name.

LMAOOOOO

and here she is. my beautiful wife madame triple x. i mean who. who is that. well we can tell she's french because of. she talks like that. everyone point and laugh at the french people. anyway madame xxx looks incredibly sexy and says "it's fine for me to read this message there's nobody around except for those three little boys digging in the sand" which is her first mistake because as we learn time and time again they're. well they're Like That. also when she thinks to herself she loses the accent which i did not pick up on initially because im silly

he's just like me guys

this made me shriek sorry dude just appeared

i KNOW barks was giggling and kicking his feet when he wrote this

at which point huey throws a grown man off a bridge. huey kill count 1

and would you LOOK WHO'S BACK

madame triple x are you free on thursday because i am free on thursday when i am free

how long was this guy just sitting there

"i'm just a girl lol"

bro you are two inches tall

NO DONALD NOOOO HE FELL ASLEEP ON THE TRAIN TRACKS NO DONALD HE CAN'T HEAR US HE HAS AIR PODS IN

you see it's FUNNY because the FRENCH PEOPLE went on STRIKE

"STOP THAT TRAIN IT'S RUNNING AWAY"

"sorry dude im on strike"

omg. see it's donald but you can tell he's spanish because he has black hair

next the triplets trap donaldo el quacko in the shower by holding him at Freezing Water Point. this wouldnt work on me because even though i have severe cold sensitivity ive been taking cold showers for three days [rv water heater broken]

after this we have a clever reference to El Materdor when donald gets ready to fight a bull.

get his ass louie

i like to think Miss Georgia Cornpone has a southern accent. actually can we fancast dolly parton. because of beautiful women

VERY SMALL!

that was so beautiful. thanks for coming with me guys. this comic is so good everyone listen to the Carl Barks Remarks episode about it because it's funny and informative ok byeee

[mercifullymad]

It’s frustrating and disappointing to see nominally social justice-focused eating disorder organizations (like Project Heal and the Alliance for Eating Disorders) support the passing of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA is opposed by more than 90 civil rights and digital rights groups, including GLAAD, GLSEN, the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. KOSA also contradicts the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children should not be subjected to “unlawful interference with [their] privacy.” One of KOSA's main premises — the belief that increased parental surveillance of children’s Internet use will protect children’s mental health — is inherently flawed, and it is of paramount importance for abused and marginalized children that mental health organizations don’t buy into this belief.

This open letter signed by several organizations details the many dangerous implications of KOSA’s overreach. While KOSA aims to protect minors under 16 from the negative effects of social media use (such as “addictive” design features and content that “promotes” eating disorders, self-harm, or substance use), its vague language enables increased surveillance of children’s Internet use, increased data collection on both children and adults alike, and the power for parents and state government officials to decide what content is “appropriate” for children. With some states increasingly legalizing the idea that any kind of content that acknowledges the existence of queer people or the U.S.’s legacy of racism is inherently “inappropriate” for children (by banning books and preventing school curriculums from mentioning these realities), KOSA has the potential to prevent children from accessing these topics online, too.

KOSA is particularly dangerous to marginalized and abused children because of the level of inescapable parental surveillance it enables. Passing KOSA might prevent a 15-year-old from looking up how to report his abusive parents or where to seek help. It might prevent a 14-year-old whose parents will disown her if she’s pregnant from looking up sex education or abortion care. It might prevent a 13-year-old living in a homophobic household from connecting with accepting peers. It might prevent 12-year-olds who are already self-harming or eating unintuitively from looking up harm reduction techniques that could keep them alive. KOSA would not keep children safe or improve their mental health — it would make the most at-risk children even more unsafe, and it would worsen the mental health of anyone living in an unsafe household or state.

I presume that eating disorder organizations are campaigning for KOSA because they believe the unrealistic, fatphobic, and eurocentric beauty standards proliferating on social media are causing and/or exacerbating eating disorders, and they are desperate for any recourse to curtail these harms. But KOSA is premised on flawed understandings of media effects, and it is a dangerous piece of legislation that wouldn’t adequately address the very real harms of social media. Multiple studies have shown that similar content bans and increased parental control have not been effective, and have even made harmful content easier to find. Whatever good intentions eating disorder organizations might have by endorsing KOSA, it is important to note that all evidence points to KOSA harming children, not helping them. 

KOSA aims to make social media companies accountable for preventing children from seeing content that “promotes” eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, and substance use. The problem is, social media algorithms are incapable of distinguishing between content that promotes these behaviors and content that discusses these behaviors in a neutral manner or provides harm reduction techniques for making these behaviors less dangerous. As the EFF notes, “there is no way a platform can make case-by-case decisions about which content exacerbates, for example, an eating disorder, compared to content which provides necessary health information and advice about the topic.” We’ve already seen Instagram repeatedly fail at distinguishing between fresh self-harm and years-old scars, censoring and removing pictures of people simply living in bodies that are scarred. If KOSA passes, any mention of the aforementioned behaviors is liable to be censored and removed from social media platforms, which may have the paradoxical effect of pushing children who want community support, neutral information, or harm reduction techniques into more harmful corners of the Internet, such as specifically pro-ED sites. 

Moreover, KOSA and the eating disorder organizations supporting it buy into the same harmful narratives of social contagion that anti-queer and anti-trans groups promote so fiercely. The narrative that children uncritically adopt any behavior or identity they see online is egregious and clearly false (especially when it comes to teens, as opposed to 8-year-olds), but of course it is easier to blame social media alone rather than thoroughly examine the systems of injustice, oppression, and abuse that contribute to children’s poor mental health. While online content that promotes self-destructive behaviors is a real harm to children that should be addressed, the way to address this harm is not by mandating governmental and parental surveillance of children’s internet use. It is to equip children with better media literacy, trustworthy adult figures they can turn to for help, and tools for critically evaluating digital content. 

Platforms certainly do need greater regulation, and children do need greater protection from social media companies, which don’t care about their mental health as long as they can profit off them. But children need real protection, not KOSA, which is just increased surveillance for everyone under the thin veneer of child protection. I encourage you to read some of the many, many articles detailing the harmful effects KOSA would have. We must demand better for children than surveillance under the guise of “care,” and we must prioritize the children who are already hurting when considering who this legislation would harm the most. 

[batboyblog]

I think that the only real reason so many people are so willing and quick to denounce the IDF’s anti terrorist activities and conflate it with larger social issues that shouldn’t even be technically related is maybe because what Israel is doing as a means to defend itself similar to how we Americans originally responded in what we needed to do in response to 9/11.

We just wanted to take down the terrorists for such a heinous crime on our people.

The issue though is that people are looking at the consequences of our wars on terror rather than their baseline goals. They look to our actions in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan post-2001 rather than the end goal of stopping terrorists, rather successful or not.

Basically, what these people are saying is that “the world had gone though one War on Terror and we all know how that went” in an attempt to discredit and denounce the whole affair, purposely ignoring the underlying objective of stopping armed and dangerous criminals that launched a heinous attack

This attitude of course is potent and corrupted by such bigotry that it frankly damages their arguments if anything

At least that’s what I think

I think there are a number of reasons,

the Iraq War is a big one in the US and UK (and the rest of Europe to a lesser extent) there's a lot of people, particularly on the left for whom any American/western involvement of any kind in a war in the Middle East is bad and always always will be because of Iraq you saw it with Libya and Syria back under Obama

I think however there's more than that, I think for Arabs and Muslims Palestine has long been an emotive issue and there's just that which we're seeing in Turkey but also from communities inside the UK or the US

I think the idea of the occupation is very emotive for a lot of people, in the 1990s there was a wave of correcting long standing historic wrongs and bring peace, you saw it in Northern Ireland, you saw it in South Africa, Americans and Europeans were involved in protests and sit ins etc in the 1980s and 90s for those causes, and also for Palestine. And I think the failure of the Camp David Process in 2000-2001 mixed with conflating American policy in Iraq with Israel (because of GWB's stated support for Israel, while being cold toward Arafat in his first term) lead to the Western peace camp to get more radicalized

I think antisemitism has ALWAYS fed into that, and lead to a lot of distortion and dehumanization, basically I think starting in the 1990s if you went to college for liberal arts and were at all political criticizing Israel was a way to get nearly automatic approval. And in the 90s it started off with reasonable criticisms you'd hear from most American Jews and many Jews of the Israeli center and left, settlements, occupation, Palestinian free movement, check points etc. But as every year goes by the need to one up and one up grows till you have groups cheering a truly horrific terrorist attack, mass murder etc.

I think it should be pretty easy to say that Hamas are bad people, monsters, and they shouldn't be in charge of any one, I think its the pro-Palestinian stand to say that an army of baby murderers and rapists shouldn't be the government of Gaza?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Edward Schlosser

Published: Jun 3, 2015

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

What it was like before

In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy.

The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. An older student raised his hand.

”What about Fannie and Freddie?” he asked. “Government kept giving homes to black people, to help out black people, white people didn’t get anything, and then they couldn’t pay for them. What about that?”

I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn’t it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let’s talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don’t think it was, how could it have been?

The rest of the discussion went on as usual.

The next week, I got called into my director’s office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.

My director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I wrote up a short description of the past week’s class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.

Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. Then ... nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never heard another word of it again.

That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me.

Now boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous — it’s suicidal

This isn’t an accident: I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

In 2009, the subject of my student’s complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn’t hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student’s complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.

In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

I wrote about this fear on my blog, and while the response was mostly positive, some liberals called me paranoid, or expressed doubt about why any teacher would nix the particular texts I listed. I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do they are at least two decades removed from the job search. The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don’t even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous, it’s suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won’t upset anybody.

The real problem: a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?

This phenomenon has been widely discussed as of late, mostly as a means of deriding political, economic, or cultural forces writers don’t much care for. Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today’s college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort.

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.

Herein lies the folly of oversimplified identity politics: while identity concerns obviously warrant analysis, focusing on them too exclusively draws our attention so far inward that none of our analyses can lead to action. Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which “particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity.” Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.

(It’s also why seemingly piddling matters of cultural consumption warrant much more emotional outrage than concerns with larger material implications. Compare the number of web articles surrounding the supposed problematic aspects of the newest Avengers movie with those complaining about, say, the piecemeal dismantling of abortion rights. The former outnumber the latter considerably, and their rhetoric is typically much more impassioned and inflated. I’d discuss this in my classes — if I weren’t too scared to talk about abortion.)

The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

So it’s not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hampshire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

When feelings become more important than issues

At the very least, there’s debate to be had in these areas. Ideally, pro-choice students would be comfortable enough in the strength of their arguments to subject them to discussion, and a conversation about a band’s supposed cultural appropriation could take place alongside a performance. But these cancellations and disinvitations are framed in terms of feelings, not issues. The abortion debate was canceled because it would have imperiled the “welfare and safety of our students.” The Afrofunk band’s presence would not have been “safe and healthy.” No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change.

In a New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait described the chilling effect this type of discourse has upon classrooms. Chait’s piece generated seismic backlash, and while I disagree with much of his diagnosis, I have to admit he does a decent job of describing the symptoms. He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones.

If we wish to remove this fear, and to adopt a politics that can lead to more substantial change, we need to adjust our discourse. Ideally, we can have a conversation that is conscious of the role of identity issues and confident of the ideas that emanate from the people who embody those identities. It would call out and criticize unfair, arbitrary, or otherwise stifling discursive boundaries, but avoid falling into pettiness or nihilism. It wouldn’t be moderate, necessarily, but it would be deliberate. It would require effort.

In the start of his piece, Chait hypothetically asks if “the offensiveness of an idea [can] be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense.” Here, he’s getting at the concerns addressed by Reed and Reilly-Cooper, the worry that we’ve turned our analysis so completely inward that our judgment of a person’s speech hinges more upon their identity signifiers than on their ideas.

A sensible response to Chait’s question would be that this is a false binary, and that ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker’s identity. Chait appears to believe only the former, and that’s kind of ridiculous. Of course someone’s social standing affects whether their ideas are considered offensive, or righteous, or even worth listening to. How can you think otherwise?

We destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus

Feminists and anti-racists recognize that identity does matter. This is indisputable. If we subscribe to the belief that ideas can be judged within a vacuum, uninfluenced by the social weight of their proponents, we perpetuate a system in which arbitrary markers like race and gender influence the perceived correctness of ideas. We can’t overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn’t exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard.

But we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus. Consider a tweet I linked to (which has since been removed. See editor’s note below.), from a critic and artist, in which she writes: “When ppl go off on evo psych, its always some shady colonizer white man theory that ignores nonwhite human history. but ‘science’. Ok ... Most ‘scientific thought’ as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.”

This critic is intelligent. Her voice is important. She realizes, correctly, that evolutionary psychology is flawed, and that science has often been misused to legitimize racist and sexist beliefs. But why draw that out to questioning most “scientific thought”? Can’t we see how distancing that is to people who don’t already agree with us? And tactically, can’t we see how shortsighted it is to be skeptical of a respected manner of inquiry just because it’s associated with white males?

This sort of perspective is not confined to Twitter and the comments sections of liberal blogs. It was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don’t doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything. Right now, there’s nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash — hop into the echo chamber, pile invective upon the next person or company who says something vaguely insensitive, insulate ourselves further and further from any concerns that might resonate outside of our own little corner of Twitter.

--

==

This has been going on for over a decade. The correct response is to mock and laugh at the people complaining, and point out that they're not ready for the big wide world outside their kindergarten mindset, so they'd be better off going back home to mommy and daddy. Not validate and endorse their feelings. We need to get back to that.

[noreligionisgood]

In 2022, a coalition of right-wing writers and leaders published a document called “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” Its section on God and public religion states: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” That’s an extraordinary — and ominous — ideological statement, one that would immediately relegate non-Christians to second-class status. It’s utterly contrary to the First Amendment and would impose a form of compelled deference to Christianity on both religious minorities and the nonreligious.

But Christian nationalism isn’t just rooted in ideology; it’s also deeply rooted in identity, the belief that Christians should rule. This is the heart of the Seven Mountain Mandate, a dominionist movement emerging from American Pentecostalism that is, put bluntly, Christian identity politics on steroids. Paula White, Donald Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, is an adherent, and so is the chief justice of Alabama, Tom Parker, who wrote a concurring opinion in the court’s recent I.V.F. decision. The movement holds that Christians are called to rule seven key societal institutions: the family, the church, education, the media, the arts, business and the government.

One doesn’t have to go all the way into Seven Mountain theology, though, to find examples of Christian identity politics. The use of Christianity as an unofficial but necessary qualification for office is a routine part of politics in the most churchgoing parts of America. Moreover, one of the common red-America arguments for Trump is that he might not be devout himself but he’ll place lots of Christians in government.

But what is Christian identity politics but another form of Christian supremacy? How does Christian identity alone make any person a better candidate for office? After all, many of the worst actors in American politics are professed believers. Scandal and corruption are so pervasive in the church that when people say, “I’m a Christian,” it tells me almost nothing about their wisdom or virtue.

Finally, we can’t forget the intense emotion of Christian nationalism. Most believers don’t follow ideological and theological arguments particularly closely. In the words of the historian Thomas Kidd, “Actual Christian nationalism is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” It is tied, in other words, to a visceral sense that the fate of the church is closely tied to the outcome of any given political race.

That fervor can make believers gullible and potentially even dangerous. Its good-versus-evil dynamic can make Christians believe that their political opponents are capable of anything, including stealing an election. It artificially raises the stakes of elections to the point where a loss becomes an unthinkable catastrophe, with the fates of both church and state hanging in the balance. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this belief invites violent action.

Committed Christian nationalists represent only 10 percent of the population, according to a 2023 PRRI/Brookings Christian Nationalism Survey. But even members of a minority that small can gain outsize power when they fold themselves into the larger Christian electorate, casting themselves as “just like you.” That’s why we cannot conflate Christian activism with Christian nationalism. One can welcome Christian participation in the public square while resisting domination, from any faith or creed

[darkmaga-retard]

https://www.globalresearch.ca/dangers-lessons-perennial-israeli-palestinian-war-big-picture/5837437

Dangers and Lessons from the Perennial Israeli-Palestinian War: The Big Picture of Propaganda and False Flag Operations

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

Global Research, August 14, 2024

False flag operations:

“The powers-that-be understand that to create the appropriate atmosphere for war, it is necessary to create within the general populace a hatred, fear or mistrust of others regardless of whether those others belong to a certain group of people or to a religion or a nation.”James Morcan(1978- ), New Zealander-born actor, writer, producer and a resident of Australia, 2014.

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in our way.” Benjamin Netanyahu (1949- ), Israeli Prime Minister (1996-1999), (2009-2021) and (2022- ), addressing Israeli settlers in the West Bank, (as quoted in ‘Netanyahu: ‘America is a thing you can move very easily'”, The Washington Post, July 16, 2010.)

“We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.” Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), American journalist, (in ‘Public Opinion’, 1922).

“Those who want thwart the creation of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfert of funds to Hamas.“ Benjamin Netanyahu (1949- ), Israeli Prime Minister, (during a meeting of the Likud party, in 2019).

Introduction

Nowadays, almost all wars, involving governments with access to enormous propaganda resources, are either deliberately provoked or simply the result of false flag operations, camouflaged under a veil of lies and fake news. In time of war, all parties lie. With the help of passive or complacent medias, not one distracted person in a hundred can see clearly what is really going on.

Rocket and missile clashes between Islamist Hamas and Israel, and atrocities and war crimes committed against civilians, are not new in that part of the world. The most recent outbreak of violence is, in reality, the continuation of a deep conflict, which is ongoing and which is entering into a new cycle of escalating violence.

Indeed, two years ago, in May 2021, serious riots took place inside the compound of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, which left hundreds of Palestinians and many police officers injured. What followed was an escalation of attacks between Israel and Hamas. The latter launched more than 1,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, while the Israeli army, in return, dropped a deluge of fire on the blockaded Gaza Strip, causing more than 150 Palestinian deaths and 10 deaths on the Israeli side.

Only six months ago, on April 5th and 6th, 2023, there were new violent clashes in Jerusalem when Israeli police raided again the al-Aqsa mosque, in the pursuit of  “agitators” who had barricaded themselves inside.

It is therefore somewhat puzzling why so many observers were taken by surprise when Hamas launched its rain of rockets on Israel, on Saturday, October 7, 2023, in an operation specifically called al-Aqsa Deluge.

Likewise, we can only remain perplexed when the Israeli government itself says it was taken by surprise, since its relations with the Palestinian populations have been extremely tense, particularly since 2021.

[reasoningdaily]

Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.”

The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I’d just returned home from my law office in a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the officer holding the gun had not stopped me because he thought I was a young professional. Since I was a young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, most people would not assume I was a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree. To the officer threatening to shoot me I looked like someone dangerous and guilty.

I had been sitting in my beat-up Honda Civic for over a quarter of an hour listening to music that could not be heard outside the vehicle. There was a Sly and the Family Stone retrospective playing on a local radio station that had so engaged me I couldn’t turn the radio off. It had been a long day at work. A neighbor must have been alarmed by the sight of a black man sitting in his car and called the police. My getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and nothing criminal was taking place prompted him to pull his weapon.

Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of my car, searched it illegally, and kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky.

People of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are often assumed to be guilty and dangerous. In too many situations, black men are considered offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country’s failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the history that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system.

At the Civil War’s end, black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. States began to look to the criminal justice system to construct policies and strategies to maintain the subordination of African-Americans. Convict leasing, the practice of “selling” the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, used the criminal justice system to take away their political rights. State legislatures passed the Black Codes, which created new criminal offenses such as “vagrancy” and “loitering” and led to the mass arrest of black people. Then, relying on language in the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for crime,” lawmakers authorized white-controlled governments to exploit the labor of African-Americans in private lease contracts or on state-owned farms.1 The legal scholar Jennifer Rae Taylor has observed:

While a black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer “discipline” to their human property), the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.

Beginning as early as 1866 in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia, convict leasing spread throughout the South and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leased black convicts faced deplorable, unsafe working conditions and brutal violence when they attempted to resist or escape bondage. An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi, grand jury recorded that six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death. The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying black men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment…so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”2

The explicit use of race to codify different kinds of offenses and punishments was challenged as unconstitutional, and criminal statutes were modified to avoid direct racial references, but the enforcement of the law didn’t change. Black people were routinely charged with a wide range of “offenses,” some of which whites were never charged with. African-Americans endured these challenges and humiliations and continued to rise up from slavery by seeking education and working hard under difficult conditions, but their refusal to act like slaves seemed only to provoke and agitate their white neighbors. This tension led to an era of lynching and violence that traumatized black people for decades.

Between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African-Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were brutal public murders that were tolerated by state and federal officials. These racially motivated acts, meant to bypass legal institutions in order to intimidate entire populations, became a form of terrorism. Lynching had a profound effect on race relations in the United States and defined the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African-Americans in ways that are still evident today.

Of the hundreds of black people lynched after being accused of rape and murder, very few were legally convicted of a crime, and many were demonstrably innocent. In 1918, for example, after a white woman was raped in Lewiston, North Carolina, a black suspect named Peter Bazemore was lynched by a mob before an investigation revealed that the real perpetrator had been a white man wearing blackface makeup.3 Hundreds more black people were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes, like arson, robbery, nonsexual assault, and vagrancy, many of which would not have been punishable by death even if the defendants had been convicted in a court of law. In addition, African-Americans were frequently lynched for not conforming to social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect or formality than observers believed due.4

Many African-Americans were lynched not because they had been accused of committing a crime or social infraction, but simply because they were black and present when the preferred party could not be located. In 1901, Ballie Crutchfield’s brother allegedly found a lost wallet containing $120 and kept the money. He was arrested and about to be lynched by a mob in Smith County, Tennessee, when, at the last moment, he was able to break free and escape. Thwarted in their attempt to kill him, the mob turned their attention to his sister and lynched her instead, though she was not even alleged to have been involved in the theft.

New research continues to reveal the extent of lynching in America. The extraordinary documentation compiled by Professor Monroe Work (1866–1945) at Tuskegee University has been an invaluable historical resource for scholars, as has the joint work of sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck. These two sources are widely viewed as the most comprehensive collections of data on the subject in America. They have uncovered over three thousand instances of lynching between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in the twelve states that had the most lynchings: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Recently, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama—of which I am the founder and executive director—spent five years and hundreds of hours reviewing this research and other documentation, including local newspapers, historical archives, court records, interviews, and reports in African-American newspapers. Our research documented more than four thousand racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 in those twelve states, eight hundred more than had been previously reported. We distinguished “racial terror lynchings” from hangings or mob violence that followed some sort of criminal trial or were committed against nonminorities. However heinous, this second category of killings was a crude form of punishment. By contrast, racial terror lynchings were directed specifically at black people, with little bearing on an actual crime; the aim was to maintain white supremacy and political and economic racial subordination.

We also distinguished terror lynchings from other racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts, although prosecution for hate crimes committed against black people was rare before World War II. The lynchings we documented were acts of terrorism because they were murders carried out with impunity—sometimes in broad daylight, as Sherrilyn Ifill explains in her important book on the subject, On the Courthouse Lawn (2007)—whose perpetrators were never held accountable. These killings were not examples of “frontier justice,” because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African-Americans. Some “public spectacle lynchings” were even attended by the entire local white population and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

Records show that racial terror lynchings from Reconstruction until World War II had six particularly common motivations: (1) a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) as a response to casual social transgressions; (3) after allegations of serious violent crime; (4) as public spectacle, which could be precipitated by any of the allegations named above; (5) as terroristic violence against the African-American population as a whole; and (6) as retribution for sharecroppers, ministers, and other community leaders who resisted mistreatment—the last becoming common between 1915 and 1945.

Our research confirmed that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for asserting basic rights. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings also confirmed how directly lynching and racial terror motivated the forced migration of millions of black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled north for fear that a social misstep in an encounter with a white person might provoke a mob to show up and take their lives. Parents and spouses suffered what they characterized as “near-lynchings” and sent their loved ones away in frantic, desperate acts of protection.

The decline of lynching in America coincided with the increased use of capital punishment often following accelerated, unreliable legal processes in state courts. By the end of the 1930s, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two thirds of those executed that decade were black, and the trend continued: as African-Americans fell to just 22 percent of the southern population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed.

Probably the most famous attempted “legal lynching” is the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young African-Americans charged with raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. During the trial, white mobs outside the courtroom demanded the teens’ executions. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all-male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, the legal scholar Stephen Bright has written, “the [white] people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial.”5 In reality, many defendants of the era learned that the prospect of being executed rather than lynched did little to introduce fairness into the outcome.

Though northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, some in the South maintained the practice until 1938. The spectacles were more often intended to deter mob lynchings than crimes. Following Will Mack’s execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon News reasoned:

Public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution.

Even in southern states that had outlawed public hangings much earlier, mobs often successfully demanded them.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised a death sentence that would be carried out by public hanging—despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, “We’ll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor.” In response, Florida officials moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before the jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on having “avoided” a lynching.

‘The migration gained in momentum’; painting by Jacob Lawrence from his Migration series, 1940–1941. Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York/© 2017 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began what would become a multidecade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty—which was used most actively in the South—as racially biased and unconstitutional. It won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment still too closely resembled “self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law” and “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race.”

Southern opponents of the decision immediately decried it and set to writing new laws authorizing the death penalty. Following Furman, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland accused the Court of “legislating” and “destroying our system of government,” while Georgia’s white supremacist lieutenant governor, Lester Maddox, called the decision “a license for anarchy, rape, and murder.” In December 1972, Florida became the first state after Furman to enact a new death penalty statute, and within two years, thirty-five states had followed suit. Proponents of Georgia’s new death penalty bill unapologetically borrowed the rhetoric of lynching, insisting, as Maddox put it:

There should be more hangings. Put more nooses on the gallows. We’ve got to make it safe on the street again…. It wouldn’t be too bad to hang some on the court house square, and let those who would plunder and destroy see.

State representative Guy Hill of Atlanta proposed a bill that would require death by hanging to take place “at or near the courthouse in the county in which the crime was committed.” Georgia state representative James H. “Sloppy” Floyd remarked, “If people commit these crimes, they ought to burn.” In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s new statute and thus reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante mob violence.

The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia officials were more than four times as likely to impose a death sentence for the killing of a white person than a black person. Accepting the data as accurate, the Court conceded that racial disparities in sentencing “are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system” and upheld Warren McCleskey’s death sentence because he had failed to identify “a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias” in his case.

Today, large racial disparities continue in capital sentencing. African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the national population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row and 34 percent of those executed since 1976. In 96 percent of states where researchers have examined the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both. Meanwhile, in capital trials today the accused is often the only person of color in the courtroom and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection continues to be widespread. In Houston County, Alabama, prosecutors have excluded 80 percent of qualified African-Americans from serving as jurors in death penalty cases.

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the more than 1,400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South, where the legacy of the nation’s embrace of slavery lingers. Today death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African-Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against it in death penalty cases remain thwarted by the familiar rhetoric of states’ rights. Regional data demonstrate that the modern American death penalty has its origins in racial terror and is, in the words of Bright, the legal scholar, “a direct descendant of lynching.”

In the face of this national ignominy, there is still an astonishing failure to acknowledge, discuss, or address the history of lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and memorials to the Civil War, to the Confederacy, and to events and incidents in which local power was violently reclaimed by white people. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their defense of white supremacy. But in these same communities there are very few, if any, significant monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of the struggle for racial equality and of lynching in particular. Many people who live in these places today have no awareness that race relations in their histories included terror and lynching. As Ifill has argued, the absence of memorials to lynching has deepened the injury to African-Americans and left the rest of the nation ignorant of this central part of our history.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguably the signal legal achievement of the civil rights movement, contained provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in voting, education, and employment, but did not address racial bias in criminal justice. Though it was the most insidious engine of the subordination of black people throughout the era of racial terror and its aftermath, the criminal justice system remains the institution in American life least affected by the civil rights movement. Mass incarceration in America today stands as a continuation of past abuses, still limiting opportunities for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

We can’t change our past, but we can acknowledge it and better shape our future. The United States is not the only country with a violent history of oppression. Many nations have been burdened by legacies of racial domination, foreign occupation, or tribal conflict resulting in pervasive human rights abuses or genocide. The commitment to truth and reconciliation in South Africa was critical to that nation’s recovery. Rwanda has embraced transitional justice to heal and move forward. Today in Germany, besides a number of large memorials to the Holocaust, visitors encounter markers and stones at the homes of Jewish families who were taken to the concentration camps. But in America, we barely acknowledge the history and legacy of slavery, we have done nothing to recognize the era of lynching, and only in the last few years have a few monuments to the Confederacy been removed in the South.

The crucial question concerning capital punishment is not whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit but rather whether we deserve to kill. Given the racial disparities that still exist in this country, we should eliminate the death penalty and expressly identify our history of lynching as a basis for its abolition. Confronting implicit bias in police departments should be seen as essential in twenty-first-century policing.

What threatened to kill me on the streets of Atlanta when I was a young attorney wasn’t just a misguided police officer with a gun, it was the force of America’s history of racial injustice and the presumption of guilt it created. In America, no child should be born with a presumption of guilt, burdened with expectations of failure and dangerousness because of the color of her or his skin or a parent’s poverty. Black people in this nation should be afforded the same protection, safety, and opportunity to thrive as anyone else. But that won’t happen until we look squarely at our history and commit to engaging the past that continues to haunt us.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and the author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.” This essay is drawn from the collection “Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,” edited and with an introduction by Angela J. Davis, which will be published in July by Pantheon.


[moralomnivore]

Went to go look up how many fish are killed in a year and found this instead. It blew me away. A million people dead in decade! What the fuck!

In Central America, lobster fishing is a big business. It dominates the fishing industry in Honduras, which exports more than 1.3 million metric tons of lobster to the United States each year. Honduras is also one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with more than 60% of the population living in poverty. Given the importance of lobster to the economy, and the poverty of many workers and families, fishers are vulnerable to exploitation. Although lobster fishing—which is done either with traps or by hand by divers—is regulated, fishers often ignore these rules. This laxity particularly affects divers. The Honduran government limits divers to no more than two dives per day that go deeper than 60 feet, but the World Wildlife Fund has observed divers performing up to 13 each day either because there aren’t enough fish or prices are too low. These divers are at increasing and deadly risk for decompression sickness because of inadequate availability of health care. Yet divers continue because diving is one of the only ways for them to earn money. Consequently, Honduran lobster divers face an extremely high mortality rate—between 400 and 900 deaths per 100,000 fishers—largely because of the lack of oversight and enforcement of the rules by the authorities.

The deadliest professions in America (logging, domestic fishing) kill a horrifying 75-90 out of 100,000 workers, but lobster fishing for the American market kills 5-12x as many people! God damn!

[ask-nationfiles]

Are they dangerous? Why does the government feel the need to keep them hidden?

Oh, someone else interested? Good to know people don't think I'm crazy.

Now, answering the question... I would bet they are, but in a very subtle way. I just recently got introduced to the nation I work if, and got trusted to the documents about them as well. And, for what I could read in them, it's said that a nation exists since the creation of their countries. Or, at least, the feeling of belonging to them.

I'll pick an example for you: the American personification. I might presume, they exist since the declaration of independence, back in 1776? So, I bet they fought at least on the American Revolutionary War, perhaps the Civil War too... And even in both World Wars! And we know exactly what the USA has done during these periods, right? I wouldn't be really surprised if the personification is behind all that stuff.

So, if they're dangerous? I'm 90% sure of it. They might act friendly around you, but a good remind is that the most possible chance is that they are war criminals. They are the type of people — things? Idk what to call them — that will smile at you but then shove a gun at your face if you speak too much. I hope I don't have this "conversation" with my own nation...

Now, why the government wants to hide them? They never gave me many details. They only said they would pay me and guarantee I'll stay with my job if I keep their existence a secret. So, it means not even us who work to them can know what they hide. But I believe it's for the very own reason that they committed atrocities in the past. I can't see not even a single one of them not doing anything wrong. If not even humans that have a short life can remain pure, imagine these immortal beings that have lived through wars and violence of all types. If humans were to know we were existing with these... things, them it would mostly cause a great fuss, something not even the great powers would be able to control.

I particularly don't want to mess with any of these nations... After all, my life is way more "fragile' compared to theirs.

But I'll eventually have to. For the sake of knowing what the heck it's up with them.

[justbeingnamaste]

....Where Are The American Demonstrations? 

The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer.Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.

The Biden administration’s disregard for border security encourages mass illegal immigration at the Southern Border, exposing the public to dangerous criminals and additional economic burdens while the middle class struggles to stay afloat amid increasing taxes, inflation, and gas prices. And despite the public’s rapidly increasing suffering, Biden prioritizes sending billions of tax dollars to foreign wars and international green energy projects.

All these things, but particularly the federal government’s targeting of conservatives and its assault on election integrity, should be sparking massive protests. Yet they aren’t. Unlike Spain, America was founded on the idea that human beings have God-given, inalienable rights. Freedom of speech and assembly are not just First Amendment givens in the United States, but part of our culture. So why aren’t conservatives protesting?

Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.

Yet federal courts openly admitted to making examples out of peaceful protesters in order to “deter others.” J6 demonstrators have been harassed by federal agents, held in solitary confinement, and demonized by the Jan. 6 Committee, Biden, and the corporate media. 

The American people have also been further scared into silence and compliance by FBI agents who terrorized pro-life activists, attempted to infiltrate traditional Catholic communities, labeled parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, and covertly categorized Trump supporters as “extremists.”....

[leviathangourmet]

For decades, advances in healthcare and safety steadily drove down death rates among American children. In an alarming reversal, rates have now risen to the highest level in nearly 15 years, particularly driven by homicides, drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides. The uptick among younger Americans accelerated in 2020. Though Covid-19 itself wasn’t a major cause of death for young people, researchers say social disruption caused by the pandemic exacerbated public-health problems, including worsening anxiety and depression. Greater access to firearms, dangerous driving and more lethal narcotics also helped push up death rates. Between 2019 and 2020, the overall mortality rate for ages 1 to 19 rose by 10.7%, and increased by an additional 8.3% the following year, according to an analysis of federal death statistics led by Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in JAMA in March. That’s the highest increase for two consecutive years in the half-century that the government has publicly tracked such figures, according to Woolf’s analysis.

The increases in suicides and homicides among young people went largely unnoticed at first because overall child and adolescent mortality rates still declined most years.  Penicillin and other antibiotics drove down deaths from bacterial infections in the years following World War II, and vaccines controlled lethal viruses such as polio and influenza. Safer automobiles, seat belts and car seats made driving less deadly. Bicycle helmets, smoke detectors and swimming lessons reduced fatal accidents and drownings. Medical advancements that save premature babies and treat leukemia and other cancers helped more children survive once-lethal diagnoses. “All of those gains are now being offset by essentially four causes of death,” Woolf said.  When the pandemic started, deaths of young people due to suicide and homicide climbed higher. Deaths caused by drug overdoses and transportation fatalities—mainly motor-vehicle accidents—rose significantly, too. Covid, which surged to America’s No. 3 cause of death during the pandemic, accounted for just one-tenth of the rise in mortality among young people in 2020, and one-fifth of it in 2021, according to the research led by Woolf, which uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Joshua Gillihan was 11 years old when the pandemic closed his suburban Houston middle school in March 2020. He’d grown up confident with lots of friends, and played baseball and rode his dirt bike in their upper-middle-class neighborhood in Cypress, Texas, said his mother, Kim Gillihan. The shutdowns turned a temporary break from organized sports into an indefinite hiatus. Kim Gillihan watched as Joshua’s typical adolescent hangups about having to wear glasses and his appearance gave way to more worrisome levels of anxiety.  “When the Covid hit, our child that was never depressed became depressed,” she said. 

[uboat53]

Quick question, what do you think the connection between illegal immigration and fentanyl overdoses is?

If you answered anything other than "nothing"… well that's what I want to address here because the reason most people can't give that accurate answer is because of a sustained barrage of misinformation mostly from conservatives and conservative media.

Now, I don't want to get too into the politics of this issue but I do want to address the misinformation and provide accurate information because I think it's influencing a good many people and not in a positive way. Here's a SHORT RANT (TM).

THE TWO ISSUES

So first off, we need to address each issue independently to understand them.

Illegal immigration generally involves two factors: people who enter the country legally and then overstay their visa and people who enter the country illegally. Generally when we speak about it, we speak about the latter.

The vast majority of illegal immigrants come from Mexico, although the proportion of those coming from Central America has increased in the last decade. These two countries are also the source of the vast majority of people who enter the country illegally, most illegal immigrants from other countries have entered the country legally and overstayed. (1)

Over the past decade and a half, and particularly since the pandemic, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has declined significantly and the vast majority of them have been in the United States for a decade or more. (1)

Fentanyl is an issue related to the broader issue of illegal drug use in the United States. Fentanyl itself is a synthetic opioid that is extremely powerful. It is often used legally as a painkiller, usually injected via an IV. However, it is easy and cheap to manufacture and is now often found either sold on its own or mixed in with other drugs (either known or unknown to the user). Because of its high strength it causes both addiction and overdose fairly easily. (2)

The United States has been experiencing a crisis in the illegal use of opioids for a decade or more which was officially declared a public health emergency in 2017. Millions of Americans became addicted to opioids which were prescribed as painkillers starting in the 1990s and, when they could no longer obtain legal drugs, turned to the illegal market for supply. (3)

Opioids are particularly dangerous and the widespread use of them has caused an increase in drug overdose deaths of nearly 650% since 1999 (4) and fentanyl is one of the leading factors in overdoses.

THE FALSE CONNECTION

So the only real connection between the two is that Mexico is a significant source of both illegal immigrants and fentanyl. However, this connection, that they come from the same country, has been used by conservatives and conservative media to suggest that illegal immigrants who cross the southern border without visas are responsible for bringing fentanyl from Mexico into the United States.

Conservative politicians, even those associated with the more establishment side such as Kelly Loeffler (5), Ron DeSantis' Florida Republican Party (6), and more MAGA politicians like Blake Masters (7), conservative sheriffs (8), and conservative think tanks (9) have parroted this connection and conservative governors have even created government agencies and projects (10) based on this misrepresentation.

It's been a fairly effective misrepresentation, 60% of Republicans believe it. (11)

THE TRUTH

The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of the fentanyl in the United States is smuggled not by illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, but by US citizens recruited by drug cartels. (12) Because of this, the vast majority of fentanyl doesn't come through the sparsely populated border regions, but through legal ports of entry. (13)

In fact, of 42 incidents between Dec. 2021 and May 2022 where the nationality of the smuggler was mentioned, 79% involved US citizens, of nearly 4,500 people charged with trafficking fentanyl from fiscal year 2015 through fiscal year 2021, just over 650 were noncitizens, and of all drug seizures between 2016 and 2020, 91% involved US citizens and only 4% involved "potentially removable people". (14)

CONCLUSION

Whatever your politics and whatever your personal beliefs are, I am of the opinion that they should be based on accurate information and, increasingly, our beliefs about both drug policy and immigration are based on demonstrably false information.

I hope you find this useful or, if you don't, at least interesting.

SOURCES

(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/13/key-facts-about-the-changing-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population/ (2) https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl (3) https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html (4) https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/drugoverdoses/data-details/ (5) https://twitter.com/KLoeffler/status/1578131733609820160?s=20&t=7xgtdZgh2swKVDNaKxdeDA (6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNOd73iBTU (7) https://twitter.com/MastersPress/status/1585384337545236481 (8) https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-sheriff-fentanyl-weapon-mass-destruction-never-thought-see-anything-worse-meth?intcmp=tw_fnc (9) https://twitter.com/Heritage/status/1571940831455768576?s=20&t=7xgtdZgh2swKVDNaKxdeDA (10) https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/operation-lone-star-combats-growing-national-fentanyl-crisis (11) https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118271910/many-americans-falsely-think-migrants-are-bringing-most-of-the-fentanyl-entering (12) https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers (13) https://www.cato.org/commentary/no-bidens-immigration-policies-are-not-blame-fentanyl-crisis# (14) https://reason.com/2022/10/17/dont-blame-migrants-and-open-borders-for-fentanyl-entering-the-country/

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Post-Riot Social Media Restrictions Aren’t Worth a Free Speech Freakout

Democracies have the right to act in their own defense—even if that means some people temporarily have to go without tweeting.

The Brazilian government wasted no time in responding to the insurrection that shook the capital city on January 8. Hundreds of arrests were made right away, and authorities mounted a robust investigation that quickly identified many of the individuals and groups who paid for the pro-Bolsonaro rioters to get to Brasília. Naturally, such a robust defense of democracy has its detractors: Some on the right have complained that the government is overplaying its hand by arresting people who were at the scene of the crime but who are really decent people in their heart of hearts.

Such allegations are too self-serving to take seriously. The element of the government’s response that has probably sparked the most indignation, however, has to do with social media. It all started when Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes issued an order around midnight after the insurrection, ordering Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram to block accounts inciting or supporting attacks on Brazil’s democratic order. A fine of 100,000 Brazilian dollars (just under $20,000, more or less) would be applied to companies that failed to act within two hours of receiving notice from the court.

Some saw this as a grave civil rights violation. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and can fairly be described as a “free speech absolutist,” was particularly vocal in denouncing the moves of de Moraes. “I can’t overstate how shocking and dangerous this new censorship order is,” Greenwald tweeted on January 13. “It’s from the same judge that even the NYT has been warning about as authoritarian.” Greenwald repeatedly referenced a New York Times piece by Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, which noted “a raw display of judicial force” by de Moraes “that crowned a trend years in the making: Brazil’s Supreme Court has drastically expanded its power to counter the antidemocratic stances of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.”

De Moraes is indeed immensely powerful, handing down decisions with a solitary force that puzzles most American observers. Criticizing the willingness of many Brazilians to applaud de Moraes in the aftermath of January 8, Greenwald tweeted, “I’ve never seen a judge in any democracy with this level of power. He’s become a venerated hero of the Brazilian left, feared and off-limits from criticism.” Greenwald’s alarmism attracted the attention of Twitter’s Grand Poobah himself. “This is extremely concerning,” Elon Musk tweeted in response to Greenwald. “Is it just one judge?” he later inquired.

One can understand why Musk, whose grip on what constitutes both the public square as well as free speech is so famously loosey-goosey, would perceive a temporary ban from Twitter as an excruciating sentence. It is not clear why anyone else should. When allegations of state censorship are bandied about, it is worth establishing a sense of proportion and stakes to which our perspective might be anchored. Here’s one: In 1975, Vladimir Herzog, a journalist born in the former Yugoslavia whose family emigrated to Brazil when he was 9, was called in for questioning by agents of the political police. The prominent editor at TV Cultura was suspected of having ties to the Brazilian Communist Party. On October 25, Herzog dutifully showed up at the police station. He was never seen alive again.

Being banned from social media for a time might be inconvenient, and it might suck for prominent users, but it is not tyranny. A handful of people being barred from social media does not a police state make.

Continue reading.

[theculturedmarxist]

On 17 October, Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz invoked his constitutional privilege under Article 65 of the Grundgesetz to ‘determine the guidelines’ of his government’s policy. Chancellors do this rarely, if at all; the political wisdom is three strikes and you’re out. At stake was the lifespan of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants. As a result of Merkel’s post-Fukushima turn, intended to pull the Greens into a coalition with her party, these are scheduled by law to go out of service by the end of 2022. Afraid of nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, and also of their well-to-do middle-class voters, the Greens, now governing together with SPD and FDP, refused to give up their trophy. The FDP, on the other hand, demanded that given the current energy crisis, all three plants – accounting for about six percent of the domestic German electricity supply – be kept in operation as long as needed, meaning indefinitely. To end the fighting, Scholz issued an order to the ministries involved, formally declaring it government policy that the plants continue until mid-April next year, par ordre du mufti, as German political jargon puts it. Both parties knuckled under, saving the coalition for the time being.

The Greens – recently called ‘the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag’ by the indestructible Sahra Wagenknecht – are rather more afraid of nuclear power than nuclear arms. Anesthetized by the rapidly rising number of Green fellow-travellers in the media and mesmerized by fantasies of Biden delivering Putin to The Hague to stand trial in the international criminal court, the German public refuses to consider the damage nuclear escalation in Ukraine would cause, and what it would mean for the future of Europa and, for that matter, Germany (a place many German Greens do not consider particularly worth protecting anyway). With few exceptions, German political elites, as well as their agitprop mainstream press, know or pretend to know nothing about either the current state of nuclear arms technology or the role assigned to the German military in the nuclear strategy and tactics of the United States.

As post-Zeitenwende Germany increasingly declares itself ready to be the leading nation of Europe, its domestic politics becomes more than ever a matter of European interest. Most Germans conceive of nuclear warfare as an intercontinental battle between Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) and the United States, with ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads crossing the Atlantic or, as the case may be, the Pacific. Europe may or may not get hit, but since the world would anyway go under, there is no need really to think about any of this. Perhaps afraid of being accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung – subversion of military strength, punishable with the death penalty in the Second World War – none of the suddenly numerous German ‘defence experts’ seems willing to confirm that what Biden calls Armageddon is a future that may become a present only following a protracted phase of ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ nuclear warfare in Europe, and indeed on Ukrainian battlefields.

One weapon of choice here is an American nuclear bomb called B61, designed to be dropped from fighter planes on military concentrations on the ground. Although all of them have sworn to devote themselves ‘to the well-being of the German people [and] protect them from harm’, no member of the German government will talk about what kind of fallout the use of a B61 in Ukraine may produce; where the winds will likely carry it; how long the area around a nuked battlefield will remain uninhabitable; and how many disabled children will be born nearby and afar over how many years, all so the Crimean peninsula can remain or become again Ukrainian. What is clear is that compared to nuclear warfare, even of the localized kind, the 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl (which hastened the rise of the Greens in Germany) would appear utterly negligible in its effects. It is notable that the Greens have up to now refrained from calling for precautions to protect the population of Germany and Europe against nuclear contamination – assembling stocks of Geiger counters or iodine tablets, for example – which one might think would recommend itself after the experience with Covid-19. Keeping sleeping dogs asleep obviously takes precedence over public health or, for that matter, the protection of the environment.

Not that ‘the West’ is not preparing for nuclear war. In mid-October, NATO staged a military exercise called ‘Steadfast Noon’, described by the Frankfurter Allgemeine as an ‘annual nuclear arms drill’. The exercise involved sixty fighter planes from fourteen countries and took place over Belgium, the North Sea and the UK. ‘Facing Russian threats to use nuclear arms’, the FAZ explained, ‘the Alliance actively and providently released information about the exercise to avoid misunderstandings in Moscow, but also to demonstrate its operational readiness’. At the centre of the event were the five countries – Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey (!) – that have a ‘nuclear participation agreement’ with the US, which provides for some of their fighter planes to carry American B61s to targets designated by the United States. Around one hundred B61s are allegedly stored in Europe, guarded by US troops. The German air force maintains a fleet of Tornado bombers devoted to ‘nuclear participation’. The planes are said to be outdated, however, and during the coalition negotiations it was a non-negotiable demand of the incoming foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, that the Tornados be replaced as soon as possible with thirty-five American F35 stealth bombers. These are now being ordered and will likely be delivered in about five years, at a price of 8 billion euros, to the dismay of the French who had hoped to be cut into the deal. Maintenance and repairs are estimated to cost two or three times that during the lifetime of the planes.

It is important to note precisely what ‘Steadfast Noon’ is about. Pilots learn to shoot down the enemy’s interceptor planes and, when close enough to the target, perform a complicated manoeuvre, the so-called ‘shoulder throw’. Approaching at a very low height, with one bomb each attached to their underside, planes suddenly reverse direction by flying a forward loop, releasing the bomb at the apex of their climb. The bomb thereby continues in the original direction of the plane, until it falls in a ballistic curve eradicating whatever it is supposed to eradicate at the end of its trajectory. At that time the plane will already be on its supersonic way home, having avoided the wave caused by the nuclear explosion. Ending on a feel-good note for its readers, the FAZ revealed that ‘strategic B-52 long-range bombers’ from the United States, ‘designed for nuclear missiles that can be dropped from great altitudes’, also participated in the exercise.

Those disposed to undertake a close reading of the public pronouncements of the governing coalition of the willing can recognize traces of debates going on behind the scenes, over how best to prevent the Great Unwashed getting in the way of what may be coming to them. On 21 September, one of the chief editors of FAZ, Berthold Kohler, a hardliner if there ever was one, noted that even among Western governments ‘the unthinkable is no longer considered impossible’. Rather than allowing themselves to be blackmailed, however, Western ‘statesmen’ have to muster ‘more courage… if the Ukrainians insist on liberating their entire country’, an insistence that we have no right to argue with. Any ‘arrangement with Russia at the expense of the Ukrainians’ would amount to ‘appeasement’ and ‘betray the West’s values and interests’, the two happily converging. To reassure those of his readers who would nevertheless rather live for their families than die for Sevastopol – and who had hitherto been told that the entity called ‘Putin’ is a genocidal madman entirely impervious to rational argument – Kohler reports that in Moscow there is sufficient fear of ‘the nuclear Armageddon in which Russia and its leaders would burn as well’ for the West to support to the hilt the Zelensky view of the Ukrainian national interest.

It was, however, only a few days later that one of Kohler’s staff writers, Nikolas Busse, plainly announced that ‘the nuclear risk is growing’, pointing out that ‘the Russian military has a big arsenal of smaller, so-called tactical nuclear arms suitable for the battlefield’. The White House, according to Busse, ‘has through direct channels warned Russia of severe consequences’ should it use them. Whether the American attempt ‘to raise Putin’s potential costs’ would have the desired effect was, however, uncertain. ‘Germany’, the article continues, ‘under the presumed protection of Biden’s strategy, has allowed itself an astonishingly frivolous debate over the delivery of battle tanks to Ukraine’, referring to tanks that would enable the Ukrainian army to enter Russian territory, overstepping what is apparently the Ukrainians’ assigned role in the American proxy war with Russia and likely provoking a nuclear response: ‘More than ever one should not expect the United States to risk its head for solo adventures (Alleingänge) of its allies. No American president will put the nuclear fate of his nation into European hands’ (unlike, one cannot avoid noting, European presidents putting their nations’ fate in American hands).

Busse’s article marked the outer limit of what the German political establishment was willing to let the more literate sections of German society know about debates with the country’s allies and what Germany may have to put up with if the war is allowed to continue. But that limit is changing rapidly. Hardly a week had gone by when Kohler, expressing the same doubts regarding the United States’ willingness to sacrifice New York for Berlin, explicitly called for Germany to acquire nuclear bombs of its own, something that has been completely and seemingly permanently outside the bounds of admissible political thought in Germany. While German nuclear capacity, according to Kohler, was to offer insurance against the unpredictability of American domestic politics and global strategy, it would also be a precondition of German leadership in Europe independent from France and closer in line with the worldview of Eastern European countries such as Poland.

Frankfurt, Goethe once noted of his hometown, ‘is full of oddities’. The same can be said today of Berlin, and indeed Germany as a whole. Bizarre things are happening, with public consideration of them tightly managed by an alliance of the centrist parties and the media, and supported to an amazing extent by self-imposed censorship in civil society. Before one’s eyes, an apparently democratically governed mid-sized regional power is being turned, and is actively turning itself, into a transatlantic dependency of the Great American War Machines, from NATO to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon to the NSA, and the CIA to the National Security Council. When on 26 September the two Nord Stream pipelines were hit by a massive underwater attack, the powers that be tried for a few days to convince the German public that the perpetrator could only have been ‘Putin’, intending to demonstrate to the Germans that there would be no return to the good old gas days. It soon became clear, however, that this strained the credulity of even the most credulous of German Untertanen. Why should what is called ‘Putin’ have voluntarily deprived himself of the possibility, small as it might be, of luring Germany back into energy dependency, as soon as the Germans became unable to pay the staggering price of American Liquid Natural Gas? And why would he not have blown up the pipelines in Russian rather than international waters, the latter more heavily policed than any other maritime landscape except, perhaps, the Persian Gulf? Why risk a squadron of Russian shock troops, which would undoubtedly have been sizeable, being caught red-handed, triggering a direct confrontation with several NATO member states under Article 5?

Lacking even a remotely credible ‘narrative’ – the new word in elevated jargon for a story manufactured for a purpose – the matter was effectively dropped, after no more than a week. Two days after the explosion, a lone reporter for a local newspaper based at the entry to the Baltic Sea observed the USS Kearsarge, an ‘amphibious assault ship’ capable of transporting up to 2,000 soldiers, exit the Baltic west-bound, accompanied by two landing boats; a photograph of two of the three mighty ships made its way onto the internet. Nobody in German politics or the national media took any notice, certainly not publicly. By mid-October, Sweden, currently applying for NATO membership, announced that it will keep the results of its investigation of the event to itself; the security rating of its findings was too high ‘to share with other states like Germany’. Shortly thereafter, Denmark also withdrew from the joint investigation.

As for Germany, on 7 October the government had to answer a question from a Die Linke Bundestag member on what it knew of the causes and perpetrators of the pipeline attacks. Beyond stating that it considered them ‘acts of sabotage’, the government claimed to have no information, adding that it would likely not have any in the future either. Moreover, ‘after careful consideration, the Federal Government has come to the conclusion that further information cannot be given for reasons of public interest’ (in German, aus Gründen des Staatswohls, literally: for reasons of the welfare of the state, a concept apparently modelled on another neologism, Tierwohl, animal welfare, which in recent German legalese refers to what breeders of chickens and pigs must allow their animals so that their farming practices can count as ‘sustainable’). This, the answer continues, was because ‘the requested information is subject to the restrictions of the “Third-Party-Rule”, which concerns the internal exchange of information by the intelligence services’ and therefore ‘affects secrecy interests that require protection in such a way that the Staatswohl outweighs the parliamentary right to information, so that the right of MPs to ask questions must exceptionally take second place to the secrecy interest of the Federal Government’. To this writer’s knowledge, there has been no mention whatsoever of this exchange in the Staatswohl-oriented media.

There have been further ominous events of this kind. In an accelerated procedure lasting only two days, the Bundestag, using language supplied by the Ministry of Justice held by the supposedly liberal FDP, amended Section 130 of the Criminal Code, which makes it a crime to ‘approve, deny or diminish (verharmlosen)’ the Holocaust. On 20 October, an hour before midnight, a new paragraph was passed, hidden in an omnibus bill dealing with the technicalities of creating central registers, which adds ‘war crimes’ (Kriegsverbrechen) to what must not be approved, denied or diminished. The coalition and the CDU/CSU voted for the amendment, Die Linke and AfD against. There was no public debate. According to the government, the amendment was needed for the transposition into German law of a European Union directive to fight racism. With two minor exceptions, the press failed to report on what is nothing other than a legal coup d’état. (Two weeks later the FAZ protested that using Section 130 for the purpose was disrespectful of the unique nature of the Holocaust.)

It may not be long before the Federal Prosecutor starts legal proceedings against someone for comparing Russian war crimes in Ukraine to American war crimes in Iraq, thereby ‘diminishing’ the former (or the latter?). Similarly, the Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution may soon begin to place ‘diminishers’ of ‘war crimes’ under observation, including surveillance of their telephone and email communication. Even more important for a country where almost everybody on the morning after the Machtübernahme greeted their neighbour with Heil Hitler rather than Guten Tag, will be what in the United States is called a ‘chilling effect’. Which journalist or academic having to feed a family or wishing to advance their career will risk being ‘observed’ by inland security as a potential ‘diminisher’ of Russian war crimes?

In other respects as well, the corridor of the sayable is rapidly, and frighteningly, narrowing. As with the destruction of the pipelines, the strongest taboos relate to the role of the United States, both in the history of the conflict and in the present. In admissible public speech, the Ukrainian war – which is expected to be termed ‘Putin’s war of aggression’ (Angriffskrieg) by all loyal citizens – becomes entirely de-contextualized: it has no history outside of the ‘narrative’ of a decade-long brooding of a mad dictator in the Kremlin over how to best wipe out the Ukrainian people, facilitated by the stupidity, combined with greed, of the Germans falling for his cheap gas. As this writer found out when an interview he had given to the online edition of a centre-right German weekly, Cicero, was cut without consultation, among what is not to be mentioned in polite German society are the American rejection of Gorbachev’s ‘Common European Home’, the subversion within the United States of Clinton’s project of a ‘Partnership for Peace’, and the rebuff as late as 2010 of Putin’s proposal of a European free trade zone ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’. Equally unmentionable is the fact that by the mid-1990s at the latest, the United States had decided that the border of post-communist Europe should be identical to the western border of post-communist Russia, which would also be the eastern border of NATO, to the west of which there were to be no restrictions whatsoever on the stationing of troops and weapons systems. The same holds for the extensive American strategic debates on ‘extending Russia’, as documented in publicly accessible working papers of the RAND Corporation.

More examples of the publicly unsayable include the historically unprecedented arms build-up on the part of the United States during the ‘war on terror’, accompanied by the unilateral termination of all remaining arms control agreements with the Soviet Union of old; the unrelenting American pressure on Germany to replace Russian natural gas with American liquid natural gas after the invention of fracking, culminating in the American decision long before the war to close down Nord stream 2, one way or other; the peace negotiations that preceded the war, including the Minsk agreements between Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, negotiated by among others the then German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which fell apart under pressure from the Obama administration and its special envoy for US-Ukrainian relations, the then Vice President Joe Biden, coinciding with a radicalization of Ukrainian nationalism (today Steinmeier keeps publicly confessing and repenting for his past sins as a peacenik, in language that effectively bars him from considering any future European security regime which does not include regime change in Russia); and not least the connection between Biden’s European and South East Asian strategies, especially the American preparations for war with China.

A glimpse of the latter was provided when Admiral Michael Gilday, US Chief of Naval Operations, in a hearing before Congress on 20 October, let it be known that the United States had to be prepared ‘for a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window’ for war over Taiwan with China. For all its obsession with the United States, the fact that it is common transatlantic knowledge that the Ukrainian war is at bottom a proxy war between the US and Russia completely escapes the official German public. Voices of the likes of Niall Ferguson or Jeffrey Sachs urgently warning against nuclear brinkmanship go unnoticed; the former in an article in Bloomberg, entitled ‘How Cold War II Could Turn into World War III’, an article that no Staatswohl-minded German publisher would have accepted.

In the Germany of today, any attempt to place the Ukrainian war in the context of the reorganization of the global state system after the end of the Soviet Union and the American project of a ‘New World Order’ (the elder Bush) is suspicious. Those who do run the risk of being branded as Putinversteher and invited on one of the daily talk shows on public television – for ‘false balance’ in the eyes of the militants – to face an armada of right-thinking neo-warriors shouting at them. Early in the war, on 28 April, Jürgen Habermas, court philosopher of the Greens, published a long article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the long title ‘Shrill tone, moral blackmail: On the battle of opinions between former pacifists, a shocked public and a cautious Chancellor following the attack on Ukraine’. In it, he took issue with the exalted moralism of the neo-bellicists among his followers, cautiously expressing support for what at the time appeared to be reluctance on the part of the Bundeskanzler for headlong involvement in the Ukrainian war. For this Habermas was fervently attacked from within what he must have thought was his camp, and has remained silent since.

Those who might have hoped for Habermas’ still potentially influential voice to help increasingly desperate efforts to prevent German policy becoming forever fixated on a Ukrainian Endsieg, cost what it may, are left with the leader of the SPD parliamentary party, Rolf Mützenich, a former university docent of international relations. Mützenich has become a hate figure of the new war coalition inside and outside the government, which tries to brand him as a relic from before the Zeitenwende when people still believed that peace might be possible without the military destruction of whatever evil empire may get in the way of the ‘West’. In a recent article on the thirtieth anniversary of Willy Brandt’s death, hidden away in a social-democratic newsletter, Mützenich warned of an impending ‘end of the nuclear taboo’ and argued that ‘diplomacy must not be limited by ideological rigour or moral teaching. We must recognize that men like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman, Bashar al-Assad and the many others will be influencing the fortunes of their countries, their neighbourhoods and the world for longer than we would like’. It will be interesting to see how long his supporters, many of them young newly elected SPD MPs, will manage to keep him in his position.

What is nothing short of astonishing is how many hawks have come out of their nests in recent months in Germany. Some figure as ‘experts’ on Eastern Europe, international politics and the military, who believe it to be their Western duty to help the public deny the approaching reality of nuclear explosions on European territory; others are ordinary citizens who suddenly enjoy following tank battles on the internet and rooting for ‘our’ side. Some of the most warlike used to belong to the left, widely defined; today they are more or less aligned with the Green party and in this emblematically represented by Baerbock, now the foreign minister. A strange combination of Joan of Arc and Hillary Clinton, Baerbock is one of the many so-called ‘young global leaders’ cultivated by the World Economic Forum. What is most characteristic of her version of leftism is its affinity to the United States, by far the most violence-prone state in the contemporary world. To understand this, it may help to remember that those of her generation have never experienced war, and neither have their parents; indeed, it is safe to assume that its male members avoided the draft as conscientious objectors until it was suspended, not least under their electoral pressure. Moreover, no previous generation has grown up as much under the influence of American soft power, from pop music to movies and fashion to a succession of social movements and cultural fads, all of which were promptly and eagerly copied in Germany, filling the gap caused by the absence of any original cultural contribution from this remarkably epigonal age cohort (an absence that is euphemistically called cosmopolitanism).

Looking deeper, as one must, cultural Americanism, including its idealistic expansionism, promises a libertarian individualism which in Europe, unlike the United States, is felt to be incompatible with nationalism, the latter happening to be the anathema of the Green left. This leaves as the only remaining possibility for collective identification a generalized ‘Westernism’ misunderstood as a ‘values’-based universalism, which is in fact a scaled-up Americanism immune to contamination by the reality of American society. Westernism, abstracted from the particular needs, interests and commitments of everyday life, is inevitably moralistic; it can live only in Feindschaft with differently moral, and in its eyes therefore immoral, non-Westernism, which it cannot let live and ultimately must let die. Not least, by adopting Westernism, this kind of new left can for once hope to be not just on the right but also on the winning side, American military power promising them that this time, finally, they may not be fighting for a lost cause.

Moreover, Westernism amounts to the internationalization, under robust American leadership, of the culture wars being fought at home, inspired by role models in the United States (although there the war may be about to be lost at least domestically). In the Westernized mind, Putin and Xi, Trump and Truss, Bolsonaro and Meloni, Orbán and Kaczyński are all the same, all ‘fascists’. With historical meaning restored to the uprooted individualized life in late-capitalist anomie, there is once more a chance to fight and even die for, if nothing else, then for the common ‘values’ of humanity – an opportunity for heroism that seemed forever lost in the narrow horizons and the hedged parochialism enshrined in the complex institutions of postwar and postcolonial Western Europe. What makes such idealism even more attractive is that the fighting and dying can be delegated to proxies, people today, soon perhaps algorithms. For the time being, nothing more is asked of you than advocating your government sending heavy arms to the Ukrainians – whose ardent nationalism would until a few months ago have seemed nothing short of repulsive to Green cosmopolitans – while celebrating their willingness to put their lives on the line, for the cause not just of regaining Crimea for their country but also of Westernism itself.

Of course, in order to make ordinary people rally to the cause, effective ‘narratives’ must be devised to convince them that pacifism is either treason or a mental illness. People must also be made to believe that unlike what the defeatists say in order to undermine Western morale, nuclear war is not a threat: either the Russian madman will turn out to be not mad enough to follow up on his delusions, or if he doesn’t the damage will remain local, limited to a country whose people, as their president reassures us on television every night, are not afraid of dying for both their fatherland and, as von der Leyen puts it, for ‘the European family’ – which, when the time is ripe, will invite them in, all expenses paid.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’, NLR 54.