emizeko

joined 5 years ago
[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 4 points 10 months ago

Consider term limits. The US Constitution was amended to enforce term limits in direct response to FDR’s popular 12-year presidency (he died in office, going on for 16). As a policy, it is self-evidently quite anti-democratic (robbing the people of a choice), but nevertheless it has been conceptually naturalized to the extent that the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was premised explicitly on the idea that repeated popular electoral victories constituted a form of dictatorship. If rotation was important to avoid corruption or complacency, corporations and supreme courts would institute term limits too. Term limits ensure that in the miraculous scenario that a scrupulous, charismatic, and intelligent individual becomes a rebellious political executive, they won’t be in power long enough to meaningfully challenge the entrenched power of corporate vehicles manned by CEOs with decades of experience. Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful advocate of austerity policy in Europe, succinctly summarized the extent to which electoral democracy is subordinate: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.” One Party States and Democratic Centralism are not the result of lack of sophistication or cronyism, they are a proven bulwark that acknowledges that political power will often need to be exerted against the will of Capital, and so the wielders of said power must necessarily undergo a much more serious vetting process than a popularity contest.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 5 points 10 months ago

Bullshit dude, bullshit. I once ate a tray of 24 assorted muffins: blueberry, lemon poppy-seed, cranberry apple, banana nut, even bran. Large muffins too, like you'd buy at the bakery, not grocery store mini-muffins. I ate the first five or six out of hunger, and the next dozen I can only attribute to gluttony, but the last half dozen were devoured by determination alone. A part of me wanted to stop— I was full, the muffins had become repulsive, and there was a disconcerting pressure in my chest. The other, stronger part of me knew that if I gave up on that muffin platter I would admit limitation. A limited man can rationalize his every weakness, turn away from every challenge, live his life within the narrow confines of comfort; that's not how I live my life. But I digress. It took six days for my bowels to move, and when they did I shat a monolithic muffin block so wide it could not be flushed, so dense it would not dissolve with repeated flushing, and so heavy it took two hands to lift. The measure of anxiety, pain, pride and love is indescribable, so don't tell me I don't understand childbirth.

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago

Detainees were blindfolded on arrival and left that way throughout their stay in overcrowded cells. Music blared non-stop to drown out the sounds of torture – earning the centre the wry nickname "The Disco."

"Here resounded our screams, our cries," Bataszew told AFP on a recent visit to the place of her nightmares.

The building today is a private residence despite being earmarked as a memorial site. On the street outside, an improvised metal monument displays photographs of women who never came back from "The Disco."

'More viciousness'

"Women were a tough nut to crack and... punished with much more viciousness than men," said Bataszew.

More than 40,000 people were tortured and some 3,200 were killed or made to disappear in the 17 years of Pinochet's post-coup rule from 1973 to 1990.

Torture was different for women than for men. Some of the methods included raping them in front of their partners, or inserting live rats into their vaginas.

Some 35,000 victims of the military junta gave evidence to the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in 2005, of which nearly 13 percent (3,399) were women – almost all of them subjected to sexual violence.

Victims testified of electric shocks to their genitals, or being raped with dogs trained to perform this vile act.

[...]

Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, now 68 years old and a retired immunologist, was one of the first captives at "The Disco," which was also known as "Venda Sexy" for the nature of the abuse meted out there.

"When I arrived there were only two other women. They took you to an underground area where they had equipment to apply electricity... and where they had the trained dog [for the rapes]," she told AFP from London, where she went into exile after being freed a year after her arrest in 1974.

Some of the worst punishments involved women's loved ones.

The report produced by Chile's torture commission recorded evidence of men being forced to rape their daughters or sisters.

"They held me to be tortured in front of him, as his wife," recounted Erika Hennings, wife of Alfonso Chanfreau – a philosophy student and an MIR leader still listed as "disappeared."

The retired teacher, 69, said she was detained for 17 days at the torture centre known as "Londres 38" after its street address, crammed into a room with 80 other people without beds and blindfolded for 24 hours.

"Londres 38 was a center of repression, torture... where I first encountered evil and cruelty," she recounted.

She said she was "used as a woman" to put pressure on Chanfreau.

'I get angry'

At Villa Grimaldi, yet another torture chamber, Shaira Sepulveda was held for 10 days.

"They got a special kick out of trying to denigrate, to destroy women," the 72-year-old told AFP.

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and now UN Commissioner for Human Rights, was also held at Villa Grimaldi in the 1970s with her mother Ángela Jeria.

"I get angry, I get angry, I get angry to see how they took advantage to destroy and kill our companions," Sepulveda said as she recently toured a rose garden created at the center in memory of female victims of the junta.

"They didn’t get what they wanted and I hope that someday we can have justice because they (the women) deserve it."

from https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/slow-justice-for-women-abused-by-chiles-dictatorship.phtml

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 4 points 10 months ago

all states are class dictatorships but only one class wants to abolish class entirely: the workers

under liberal democracy the choices presented are performatively feeling bad about exploitation (the democrats) or reveling in it (the republicans), while anyone successful enough at organizing against capital is killed by the American security apparatus

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

I was reading a book about American Chattel Slavery called "Slavery's Capitalism" and that book made it clear how plantation overseers would use small prizes as an incentive to get slaves to compete with each other. Two able bodied slaves might compete with each other over a cup of sugar, or a hat (commodities which they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to have), for instance. The overseers would use this to get them to reveal their capacity for excessively hard work and, this part is key, then proceed to raise the harvesting quota on all the other slaves. Failure to meet quotas would result in one whip lash per pound by which they fell short. Here's the larger quote:

In other cases, enslavers used positive incentives to get people to pick faster, setting up races between individuals with prizes like a cup of sugar, a hat, or a small amount of money. But such speed-ups shouldn't be seen simply as attempts to import positive incentives into a system dominated by negative ones. They were also tricks, designed to get enslaved people to reveal capacities they were hiding. In Georgia, John Brown's enslaver Thomas Stevens would "pick out two or more of the strongest and sturdiest, and excite them to a race at hoeing or picking, for an old hat, or something of the sort. He would stand with his watch in his hand, observing their movements, whilst they hoed or picked across a certain space he had marked out. The man who won the prize set the standard for the rest. Whatever he did, within a given time, would be multiplied by a certain rule, for the day's work." But enslavers also whipped greater picking speed out of enslaved people in the field itself, forcing their targets to devote sustained attention and unrelenting effort to their speed and accuracy (less leaves, dirt, "trash," etc. in the picked fibers). This kind of invigilation reveals yet again the major differences between the labor system used on the cotton frontier and that used in the Lowcountry. It also reveals the essence of the enslavers' plan: to force enslaved people to show their left hands. Here, on the cotton frontier, enslavers "whipped up" enslaved people to force them to reveal capacities they were hiding, or that had not yet been created. "As I picked so well at first," remembered John Brown, "more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day," after starting at a minimum requirement of 100. "Old man Jonas watched us children and kept us divin' for that cotton all day long," remembered lrella Battle Walker, and "us wish him dead many a time."

Similarly, under post-slavery wage servitude, we are incentivized as workers to compete with each other over small concessions, small privileges, for which we are supposed to be proud of having, but our overexertion in attempting to beat each other, and win those privileges, is used to raise the expectations on everyone else. Productivity increases while wages fail to keep up with inflation. More and more surplus value is extracted by the Capitalist, and we are inundated with "hustle and grind" propaganda.

@DodecaWeasel@hexbear.net

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

crying "whataboutism" was what the USA resorted to after they couldn't come up with a comeback against the Soviets, because every time they tried to criticize the USSR for being oppressive the Soviets would just respond with “you literally lynch black people”.

Citations Needed Ep 66: Whataboutism - The Media's Favorite Rhetorical Shield Against Criticism of US Policy

But what if "whataboutism" isn’t describing a propaganda technique, but in fact is one itself: a zombie phrase that’s seeped into everyday liberal discourse that – while perhaps useful in the abstract - has manifestly turned any appeal to moral consistency into a cunning Russian psyop. From its origins in the Cold War as a means of deflecting and apologizing for Jim Crow to its braindead contemporary usage as a way of not engaging any criticism of the United States as the supposed arbiter of human rights, the term "whataboutism" has become a term that - 100 percent of the time - is simply used to defend and legitimizing American empire’s moral narratives.

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

even the UN called it apartheid until the Zionists made them pull the paper

Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid [PDF]

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough, though not inhuman". But, he added: "We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded."

but in contrast the USA's Phoenix Program is well-documented

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The American liberal, faced with this reality, tends to concede that truth is in fact drowned out by a relentless tide of spin and propaganda. Their next move is always predictable, however. It’s another lesson dutifully drilled into them in their youth: “At least we can dissent, however unpopular and ineffectual!” The reality, of course, is that such dissent is tolerated to the extent that it is unpopular.

Big-shot TV host Phil Donahue demonstrated that challenging imperial marching orders in the context of the invasion of Iraq was career suicide, when a leaked memo clearly explained he was fired in 2003 because he’d be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” [5] The fate of journalists unprotected by such wealth or celebrity is darker and sadder. Ramsey Orta, whose footage of Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe!” to NYPD cops choking him to death went viral, was rewarded for his impactful citizen journalism by having his family targeted by the cops, fast-tracked to prison for unrelated crimes, and fed rat poison while in there. [6] The only casualty of the spectacular “Panama Papers” leak was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation, who was assassinated with a car-bomb near her home in Malta. [7] Then there’s the well-publicized cases of Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. That said, I tend think to such lists are somewhat unnecessary since, ultimately, most honest people confess that they self-censor on social media for fear of consequences. (Do you?)

In other words, the status quo in the West is basically as follows: you can say whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t actually have any effect.

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

" The boyfriend" looks nice and the girls seem to have eaten their spaghetti and meat balls!

[–] emizeko@hexbear.net 6 points 10 months ago

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States," General Jacob H. Smith said.

Since it was a popular belief among the Americans serving in the Philippines that native males were born with bolos in their hands, Major Littleton "Tony" Waller asked, "I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir."

"Ten years", Smith said.

"Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?"

"Yes." Smith confirmed his instructions a second time.

 

by Xiaoyu Wang

 
 
 

you can't talk openly with anyone, American culture is fucking insipid and empty, I hate it here

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by emizeko@hexbear.net to c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by emizeko@hexbear.net to c/memes@hexbear.net
 

credit to @SLAMMER.bsky.social

 

Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar

Following the first Arab-Israeli war, of 1948, rumours surfaced that the typhoid epidemic that struck the Arab town of Acre days before its fall on 18 May, had been caused by bacteria poured into the town’s water works by agents of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia. Later that month, the Egyptian government announced that it had caught two ‘Zionist’ operatives as they were trying to infect wells near Egyptian-occupied Gaza. The two episodes have been mentioned in several books[1] and discussed by Sara Leibowitz-Dar, Avner Cohen and Salman Abu Sitta in articles published some twenty years ago, based mainly on interviews.[2] But real-time Israeli documentation of the country’s clandestine biological warfare in 1948 remained closed to researchers and over the years government agencies have tried to suppress information on the subject. For example, crucial words in Ben-Gurion’s diary for 1948, published in 1982 by the Defense Ministry Press, were deleted.[3]

The code name of the biological warfare operation – ‘Cast Thy Bread’ (in Hebrew: shallah lahmekha, from ‘cast thy bread upon the waters’ (shallah lahmekha ʿal pney ha-mayim, Ecclesiastes 11:1)) is partially mentioned, as shallah, in a memoir published in 2000 by Arieh Aharoni, a Palmah officer in 1948, who unequivocally asserted that the operation aimed at poisoning water used by the invading Egyptian army.[4] The full code name is mentioned in the 2003 article by Abu Sitta, who received the information from Israeli military historian Uri Milstein.[5] Once aware of the code name, we were able to trawl through hundreds of files in the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry Archive (henceforward, IDFA), produced by military units operating in areas that we thought might have been targeted in the operation, and to identify relevant documents. Israel Government censors, apparently unaware of the significance of the code name and confused by the cryptic language generally used, let them through. Furthermore, we found a crucial letter by David Ben-Gurion from 14 May 1948, preserved in a private archive, and used unpublished – and highly revealing – interviews with two key figures, Ephraim Katzir (Katchalsky) and Shemarya Guttman. In addition, a privately printed memoir by Rafi Kotzer, commander of an elite Israel Defense Forces (the Israeli army, henceforward IDF) unit in 1948, also supplied useful information. Taken together, these documents revealed that the Acre and Gaza episodes were merely the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged campaign, designed initially to prevent Palestinian Arab militiamen from returning to their villages from which they harassed Jewish settlements and road traffic and, later, to hinder the Arab states’ armies that invaded Palestine on 15 May 1948.

In the following pages we offer a step-by-step reconstruction of Israel’s top secret biological warfare campaign during the 1948 War and describe how, if at all, it affected the war-making. Along the way, we shall show how dissenting voices, at various levels of government and army, hampered the unfolding operations. However, due to the fragmentary nature of the available sources, ours remains a skeletal reconstruction.

[continues in the PDF]

 

(cw: n-word slur quoted)

 
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