mycorrhiza they/them

vote for who you’d rather negotiate with

I’m not saying don’t vote, but is it reasonable to expect that we can negotiate for much of anything?

“If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

. . .

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

deleted by creator

The nazis rose to power because they were backed by capitalists and the German establishment, and the reason they were backed was that they helped suppress a resurgent socialist movement in Germany and redirect the frustration of the german middle class toward scapegoated minorities and away from capitalists. Nazis co-opted socialist language and messaging, but were staunch capitalists and class-collaborationists who carried out mass privatization and crushed labor organizing.

If I started arguing something about any of my fields of study and you seem less well versed, that doesn’t give me the right to berate you for it

what if I acted like I was well-versed and scoffed at your opinions about a subject you knew more than me about?

limit your arrogance

it’s not arrogance, it’s frustration. That’s also why I pointed out the misspelling, to point out that you don’t know about this topic and yet you are confident in your opinions about it.

Libya is not an English word, it’s a country name — but that said, I didn’t consider that your language might use a totally different script, e.g., in Chinese, Libya is 利比亚

claiming the US is responsible for this and that […] wrongfully blame it for other unrelated things

a claim I literally never made.

quick search

emphasis on quick.

I’m not a lemmy.world user, I’m a lemmy.ml user

Next comment: Jessica Lynch. Probably my last one for the night. Separate because there’s no room in the last comment.

I’ll post this now then edit things in, so you know I’m still writing and don’t go “oh you conveniently ignored my other shit!”

Your link glosses over the important part. She was free to leave the fucking hospital. They didn’t need some spec ops snatch squad in the middle of the night to steal her from her captors because there were no captors at that point, the Iraqi army had fled.

https://www.foxnews.com/story/hospital-staff-forceful-u-s-rescue-operation-for-lynch-wasnt-necessary

NASIRIYAH, Iraq – The U.S. commandos refused a key and instead broke down doors and went in with guns drawn. They carried away the prisoner in the dead of night with helicopter and armored vehicle backup – even though there was no Iraqi military presence and the hospital staff didn’t resist. […] An Associated Press reporter spoke to more than 20 doctors, nurses and other workers at the hospital. In interview after interview, the assessment was the same: The dramatics that surrounded Lynch’s rescue were unnecessary.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/15/iraq.usa2

Hassam Hamoud, a waiter at a local restaurant, said he saw the American advance party land in the town. He said the team’s Arabic interpreter asked him where the hospital was. “He asked: ‘Are there any Fedayeen over there?’ and I said, ‘No’.” All the same, the next day “America’s finest warriors” descended on the building.

“We heard the noise of helicopters,” says Dr Anmar Uday. He says that they must have known there would be no resistance. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital.

“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show - an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors.” All the time with the camera rolling. The Americans took no chances, restraining doctors and a patient who was handcuffed to a bed frame.

The military has disputed that they used blanks, but that’s even worse if you ask me. It means they were firing live rounds, in or near a civilian hospital full of doctors and patients, with no enemies in sight, to provide background noise for a propaganda video.

I’m not getting into the media falsehoods about her supposed heroism, which she herself denies, because it’s late and I’m tired.

this is why I was hesitant to list more examples, because I knew I might get a five-seconds-on-google shotgun response like this and then I would have to write an arduous reply with a lot more effort than you put in, and in the time it takes me to write that reply people see a few paragraphs with links and assume you wrote a slam dunk.

fuck it, I’m posting this now and then editing in more stuff as I go

for starters, your scary-looking “misinformation circulation online” link is talking about death figures due to the bombing. That’s not the fucking point, the point is the removal of Qaddafi and the ensuing power vacuum and political breakdown in Libya. You get there in your next sentence, where you act like you’re correcting me (and misspell Libya), but then take all the blame off NATO with a vague wave of the hand. Who do you think overthrew Qaddafi? Who armed and supported the rebels? Who bombed his fucking motorcade?

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44234613

Through months of military stalemate in Libya it was an open secret among NATO allies that countries inside and outside the alliance were quietly but crucially helping rebels gain their footing against the much stronger forces loyal to longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Covert forces, private contractors and U.S. intelligence assets were thrown into the fight in an undercover campaign operating separately from the NATO command structure. Targeted bombings methodically took out Gadhafi’s key communications facilities and weapons caches. And an increasing number of American hunter-killer drones provided round-the-clock surveillance as the rebels advanced.

These largely unseen hands helped to transform the ragtag rebel army into the force storming Tripoli.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/covert-teams-from-nato-members-provided-critical-assistance-to-libyan-rebels/

(warning, Atlantic Council link)

As the battle in Libya appeared at stalemate, it was an open secret that foreign military advisers were working covertly inside the country providing guidance to rebels and giving tactical intelligence to NATO aircraft bombing government forces. […] The assistance included logisticians, security advisers and forward air controllers for the rebel army, as well as intelligence operatives, damage assessment analysts and other experts, according to a diplomat based at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. […] Foreign military advisers on the ground provided key real-time intelligence to the rebels, enabling them to maximize their limited firepower against the enemy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/france-sent-arms-to-libyan-rebels/2011/06/29/AGcBxkqH_story.html

French officials announced Wednesday that they had armed rebels in Libya, marking the first time a NATO country has said it was providing direct military aid to opponents of the government in a conflict that has lasted longer than many policymakers expected.

Surprise, it was the fine countries of NATO!

I wonder what sort of motives NATO countries had to intervene in Libya?

https://www.foia.state.gov/Search/results.aspx?searchText=C05779612&beginDate=&endDate=&publishedBeginDate=&publishedEndDate=&caseNumber=

According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa)

Shit, it was oil and imperialism!

And what about the public reasons for the intervention?

https://www.salon.com/2016/09/16/u-k-parliament-report-details-how-natos-2011-war-in-libya-was-based-on-lies/

Article title: U.K. Parliament report details how NATO’s 2011 war in Libya was based on lies

subtitle: British investigation: Gaddafi was not going to massacre civilians; Western bombing made Islamist extremism worse

[…]

The Libya inquiry, which was launched in July 2015, is based on more than a year of research and interviews with politicians, academics, journalists and more. The report, which was released on Sept. 14, reveals the following:

• Qaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians. This myth was exaggerated by rebels and Western governments, which based their intervention on little intelligence.
• The threat of Islamist extremists, which had a large influence in the uprising, was ignored — and the NATO bombing made this threat even worse, giving ISIS a base in North Africa.
• France, which initiated the military intervention, was motivated by economic and political interests, not humanitarian ones.
• The uprising — which was violent, not peaceful — would likely not have been successful were it not for foreign military intervention and aid. Foreign media outlets, particularly Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya, also spread unsubstantiated rumors about Qaddafi and the Libyan government.
• The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

Well shit, this all sounds a lot like Iraq. Why do we keep falling for the same bullshit over and over and over again?

a million Iraqis died on a lie in your lifetime. The bombings and sanctions after the Nayirah testimony killed another million people in the 90s. The Jessica Lynch abduction hoax was widely publicized, I’m sure you’ve heard of that one, Lynch herself came out against it. Fictitious witness accounts of a genocide in Libya led to a NATO bombing campaign that obliterated a once-prosperous country and there are now open-air slave markets in Libya. A large number of North Korean defector testimonies have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian.

this is all stuff that’s been in the news, that you’ve probably heard of.

I’m really not excited to go further in a thread where people upvote something like this in response to my earlier comment:

pretending that a video of this one guy from 40 years ago paints a complete and accurate picture of what’s going on today

Let’s add to this analogy that the entire media is pointing to this homeless guy as an excuse to kill other homeless people

struggling to reach escape velocity with this comment, wording it is mentally taxing but the later it gets the slower I think

I can’t speak for anyone or read the thoughts behind people’s words online, but I know people tend to say fucked up things when they are angry and I know people are really fucking angry right now, myself included. That doesn’t mean I feel catharsis watching religious extremists slaughter a village of Israeli settlers or shoot up of a fucking rave — but I feel a kind of enraged grief. Because that kind of barbarism and extremism is the inevitable fucking result of what has been done in Palestine. Extremism like that doesn’t spring up in a vacuum. When you hear things like, half of the people in Gaza are children, and half of those children struggle with suicidal thoughts, and 95% of the fucking water is unsafe to drink, and most of the population is unemployed, and then you turn on the news and all the politicians and media personalities are throwing their unreserved support to the government responsible for it… and then I go on lemmy and I see comments talking about Palestinians like they’re some kind of hive mind, and getting upvotes for it, it just feels like these attitudes are why the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians can continue. And I’m helpless to do anything about it. It’s fucking maddening.

It’s a statement, something you would back up with arguments.

I post one thing, you think it’s the only thing I can post?

hexbear had an entire thread with hundreds of comments where they all agreed they hated trump and viewed him as an odious fascist

https://lemmy.ml/post/4040923?scrollToComments=true

The closest thing you find to support for trump in there is some of them thinking he is a less effective imperialist.

You guys have never seen an argument that you didn’t dodge

You didn’t make an argument, you just said “Bolsheviks aren’t leftists.” Am I supposed to write some kind of “most common criticisms” FAQ-style response? What do you want from me on a fucking weeknight.

I take it as frustrated leftists overcorrecting in the other direction in response to media coverage that ignores the decades of openly racist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and treats this attack as some sudden unprovoked thing out of left field.

a lot of you are uninformed. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve fucking seen it firsthand. And it’s not surprising, because a lot of these topics are fucking arduous to learn about, you don’t just pick it up ambiently by browsing reddit and watching the news.

where’s everyone else’s nuance in this thread? Is it just me who needs to write a carefully worded diplomatic letter?

You want my opinion, I think we are making the same mistakes we made after 9/11, where we work ourselves up into a fucking frenzy, ignore the historical background of what’s happening, buy in to a simplified narrative, and give vague blanket support to whatever awful countermeasures we’re told are appropriate. Like the indiscriminate bombings that are killing hundreds of Palestinians now and probably not hitting a single Hamas fighter since they’re all down in the fucking tunnels.

Or this collective punishment shit, which is a fucking war crime against the entire population of Gaza:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

It starts to sound like “human animals” might refer to Palestinians in general.

it’s rad when a political position built on a lot of background knowledge is dismissed by people who lack that knowledge and have lived their whole lives in the global capital of anticommunist propaganda

And we pumped just, just, dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists, uh, in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimunda maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimunda women who had supposedly been their victims.

These were fake photos?

Oh, absolutely. We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and that sort — totally false propaganda.

Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere