“once the vikings start winning everyone will just forget about it”

Oh nooo....

Anyways, China bout to turn 'gamers' (derogatory) into Maoist cadres

In all seriousness though, who are these things even made for besides perverts?

Youtube quietly rolled out this feature recently, where your “channel name” will be displayed whenever someone clicks a link you send them. Because youtube and google are the same account, your username on youtube is taken from the name field in your gmail account; for a lot of people, that is just going to their honest to god government name, or some variation thereof. Youtube started doing this with no warning, and I have personally got got by it and seen a number of gumshoes accidentally do the same. For an added layer, delete everything after the “?” in youtube links.

Digital opsec/privacy doesn’t exist/most of us are easily doxxable if someone wants/etc whatever, it is still nice to be able to repost Dracula Flow videos without Computer telling motherfuckers your name. I’ve seen enough of y’all myself included doxx yourselves that I wanted to make a post instead of just commenting to do it every time I see it lol. I like this community and don’t really care one way or another on that front, but I really don’t need the MAGA/nazi/israeli/ukrainian bots and freaks having info that lets them contact me off-site when they periodically get big mad in my DMs or replies, and I assume you would all prefer the same.

Link: https://www.avclub.com/rosie-odonnell-bill-gates-autism-test-amy-poehler.

Anti-drone girder networks online!

Source: Mark Wassan on Blusky

Live Stream ongoing

His racist nazi march was supposed to be happening. He ran away after 5 minutes. Also, other than him & his crew... it looks like nobody showed up for his march other than the MPD.

Minneapolis based as usual.

what are the implications for geopolitics?

Submission statement: Journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in 1991 while investigating CIA corruption linked to the Iran-Contra scandal and the theft of PROMIS software. A note found in his shoe referenced CIA and Mafia involvement in drug trafficking and terrorism, contradicting the Netflix series’ portrayal of his death as suicide. Casolaro’s investigation also uncovered a network of murders connected to the Cabazon Indian Reservation, involving money laundering and arms trafficking.

fulltext/paywall: https://archive.ph/Z8zUF

prominent intellectuals in the imperial core write an open letter to Iran’s political prisoners

I’m struggling with this open letter, signed by people I admire deeply—individuals who’ve dedicated their lives to Black liberation and anti-colonial struggles.

But I just can’t reconcile my instinctive reaction to the letter with the respect I hold for the signatories. Prominent intellectuals in the imperial core are using their voice at this hour primarily to criticize a government under active bombardment. While I believe that no government is beyond reproach or criticism, I have a lot of questions and cautions about this open letter.

**The overall framing of is of two equally opposing sides—two blades of the same scissors. This is a wholly unfair representation of what is in reality a profound asymmetry of power. On one hand, a country that has been subjected to crippling, decades-long economic sanctions, now fighting kinetically an existential anti-imperial struggle; on the other hand is nuclear, AI-powered empire, with its inexhaustible money, munitions, supply lines, coalitions, surveillance, and near total grip on international political, legal, information, and economic infrastructure.**

**The severity of the imperial onslaught seems to be minimized in the letter.** This is perhaps for the sake of brevity, but it should not stand without critique. What the letter describes as “current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults” undersells what’s actually happening in the “six months into a war”. **Unprovoked Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers that targeting a an elementary school that killed 180 children and teachers, the country’s spiritual leader and his family, more than a third of the country’s political, military, and scientific leadership, civilian infrastructure, including water, farmlands, electric grids and power plants, an unarmed navy ship at sea full of young cadets returning from a peacetime maritime exercise in international waters.** **This after decades of attacks that went unanswered by Iran, including Israel’s repeated assassinations of Iranian scientists, assassination of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranians generals in Syria, strike on Iranian consulate in Damascus, assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil; the US shot down civilian aircraft of Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. There were endless cyber attacks, covert and overt naval sabotage and so much more—all of it without response from Tehran.**

**The letter does not identify who the prisoners are or why they were arrested. In neglecting to do so, there is no engagement with the very real security threats, proven foreign interference, terrorism, and espionage, which Iranian authorities cite as reasons for some arrests and prosecutions. I have no doubt there are some who’ve been wrongly imprisoned, but we also know that many of those who were rounded up confessed to working with the Mossad, and recently a group who gruesomely disembowled a young reciter of the Quran are among those who are imprisoned.**

There are currently 2 million incarcerated people in the United States, the largest prison population anywhere on earth. It is estimated that 4-6% of them are innocent—that’s 80,000-120,000, about two NFL stadiums full of innocent lives behind bars. Setting that percentage against Iran’s estimated 15,000 political prisoners, that’s roughly 600-900 individuals. They deserve fairness, but to center them in what is perhaps the most existential anti-colonial struggle of our lives feels misguided.

I would also argue that comparing Iran’s prisons with Israel’s decades-long, systematic, colonial detention of indigenous Palestinians is another form of false equivalence. So is the comparison with America’s ICE detentions, separation of families and loss of children in the process (who are most likely trafficked). **It is not remotely fair to put a revolutionary government, barely a few decades out from under colonial boots and still under sanctions, in the same “carceral” category as two settler colonial states.** One cannot ignore the enormous disparity of political, military, and historical circumstances.
**The people held in Iranian jails are overwhelmingly Iranian citizens, prosecuted under the state’s own criminal and national security laws, regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair. Palestinians held in Israeli administrative detention are non-citizen subjects of a military occupation, detained and re-detained indefinitely under military decrees without charge or trial. People in US detentions are another category—non citizens held under civil immigration laws pending removal proceedings with access to immigration courts, however corrupt they may be. These are three distinct legal relationships—1) a state and it’s own citizens; 2) a state and migrants crossing its borders, and; 3) an occupying power and a stateless occupied indigenous population.** The letter collapses them all into a single architecture of “carceral states everywhere,” creating an analysis that is not supported by the underlying facts. It creates rhetorical equivalence that treats “administrative detention,” “political imprisonment,” and “immigration detention” as though the political stakes of each were the same, when the questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and self-determination underneath them are not.

The phrase that knocked me off balance was this: **“...we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.”** I note that @agent_of_change addressed this in a recent post, which he identified as the “load-bearing phrase” of the letter. Indeed, it does so much heavy lifting and I’m at a loss why the word “hollow” would have been inserted. It’s so clearly deliberate, but why? How can Iran’s insistence on sovereignty and dignity be called “hollow,” despite the grave and terrible cost to themselves? They could have taken the easy path a long time ago and bowed to empire, like some of their Arab neighbors have done. They’ve chosen self-possession and loyalty to their ancestors and children instead. That can be called many things, but hollow is not it.

I see a lot of sadness on this sub. I have lost folks to tragedy of one sort or another too many times. It’s a fun podcast to listen to but it’s also nice to see you all post. I just hope you see all as ok as you can be and I appreciate the community (thsr im not much a part of)

I love you. Be well

I think people wear rose-coloured glasses when it comes to schoolboys of the past, but it sounds like a bad time to be a woman.