smh, can't have a little fun.

BRICS condemns Israel war on Gaza in signal to the West (Al Jazeera, 21 Nov 2023)

just thought this bit was interesting:

India, though, has not been as vocal and has in fact cracked down on pro-Palestine marches at home, seemingly siding with Israel and its biggest benefactor, the US, in what is seen as a split within the BRICS itself.

But that split did not seem glaring at Tuesday’s summit, which experts say is a first-of-its-kind meeting for a group that has previously focused on economic issues.

“I am not sure I recall a similar extraordinary summit being called,” Gruzd told Al Jazeera. “It does reflect on the growing assertiveness and confidence of the BRICS grouping, not waiting for the West. BRICS has generally shied away from political and security issues; this meeting goes against that trend.”

Are Democrats betting on Project 2024 fearmongering being all they need to win the upcoming election? That's the only thing I'm seeing them talk about and nothing else.

Legalism is so fucked. Even the best lawyers are contributing to an absolutely shit system. Imagine, as a group of lawyers who regularly stand up against this sort of thing in theory, not being able to stop the courts from repressing your freedom of speech and assembly by halting your union vote on something which is 100% none of their fucking business.

Anyway, yeah: public defenders, of all people, being falsely accused of anti-Semitism for opposing genocide. Yeehaw.

bit idea: flying the Jordanian flag 🇯🇴 to bait American zionists who don't know the difference

Do you think Zelensky speaks with the Ghost of Kiev the same way Milei speaks with his dead dog?

That's the most active use of passive voice the NYT has ever used to describe Israeli atrocities. What I'm saying is that it's a little less passive than usual which actually is a big change. Sadly enough.

Nitter

The man was injured as soldiers shot live rounds at Palestinians outside of the military prison near Ramallah, our sister channel Al Jazeera Arabic reports.

Live fucking rounds. What the fuck. Only democracy btw

So ceasefire just means IOF cops do the brutalizing instead of the bombers?

Human interest low stakes news

I think the decision to remove a recent article posted by one of our comrades which criticized white gay males should be reconsidered because I don't think it was reactionary

It included the segment from a gay white male perspective on why intersectionality is still important, and the article specifically mentions the Gay Liberation Front, the org named after the National Liberation front of Vietnam, where Leslie Feinberg spent so much energy fighting rival assimilationist orgs and assimilationist currents motivated by gay white male individuals who always had the liberty to jettison anti-racism and anti-imperialism if they wanted to (and successfully did so, e.g considering the current state of Pride© and queer struggle today, the tendency of many queer spaces to end up almost exclusively white, and among these spaces even as irrelevant but visible and memed about "leftist" discords being 100% white anti-authoritarian chauvinists etc etc)

The article goes into intersectionalist and assimilationist currents, I think many respondents did not read the article before writing

Feels like the pro-Ukraine crowd is deluding itself again into thinking Russia is doomed to failure. Here's an example from a random lib forum:

These liberals are legitimately living in a parallel universe, even compared to the mainstream media now. Q-anon but for centrist libs.

Edit: don't know why that screenshot came out so small. Open in new tab for a larger image.

Ok something has been nagging at me since they lowered the number of casualties from the prison break. Whats a reasonable hostage:armed men ratio? 2:1? 3:1 if they are mostly women and children?

Reports of the casualties in the days after oct 7 were at 1400 for a bit and then scaled back to 1200 (minus 427 military and police) because some of the corpses were harder to identify due to "damage" and turned out to be Hamas fighters.

How many of those Hamas fighters were holding hostages and were likely close to them when they were killed? Killed in a way that made it IDing them take a month. There are multiple witness accounts of the IDF and police firing on hostages and their captors. There are also admissions of IDF shooting anything that moved and video of them blowing up random cars and a person on a bicycle.

So back to the ratio. 200 Hamas fighters blown up beyond identification means how many hostages as collateral damage? How many Israelis did the IDF kill? I'm starting to think its more than half. Then I think of the testimony from Yasmin Porat . I'm starting to think maybe Hamas only killed a few people who resisted and the rest were killed by trigger happy IDF.

There might be a solid case for an unequivocal "Hamas did nothing wrong" stance.

We're so close to having an unedited Ben Garrison comic that just has "cum" labeled everywhere

Dublin be like:

We gotta get more racist

Oh and even mcnuggets weighing in, should have had both legs broken.

P.S. you having shite housing, and your prime minister being landlord, are in fact connected, dissafected irish masses

Recent events have got me thinking just how goddamn foolish modern apartheid supporters/neo nazis are in South Africa. Thinking back to the AWB in the 90s, these people made a three legged swastika as a logo, seemed obsessed with the current North West province, tried to fight a war over fucking Ventersdorp (a town of 4000 people) because F.W de Klerk was speaking there, wanted to make Brits their capital, and ended up fighting battles against the apartheid police and army, as well as invading the bantustan located in the current North West province and getting humiliated by them.

I'm glad they were so stupid, because at their peak they had over 500 000 members. Now they only have 5000.

surely they have a contingency chain of cummand in case the frontline extraction squad is killed

Legal argument on why the seizure of Galaxy Leader isn't piracy: https://nitter.cz/meowsandry/status/1727184910710882785

Fascinating that as soon as there were reports of Gabriel Boric's "nightly visits to his lady friend" Argentina elected a guy that has clearly never eaten ass.

Its like Chile and Argentina are intercontected and only one of their presidents can fuck at a time.

Israel is gonna be killing more of their hostages when they formally end the ceasefire.

Hezbollah blew up ~~some barracks~~ the headquarters of the Galilee Division

can't wait for the idf to claim that 2 soldiers were lightly injured

I do condom hamas and jerk off dead IDF soldiers

Youtube comment

Occupation is the problem not the resistance. Remember Mandela?

Brits beefing with Milei for saying the Falklands are Argentina.

Ordered shit online and discovered the website had an old login from me with an old address that they decided to fill in as my billing address, however my delivery address was taken from paypal and was correct therefore.

Sent them an email telling them that the billing address specifically is wrong and that it should match the delivery address, get an email back telling me they fixed it.

Delivery notification this morning... they changed the delivery address to the outdated billing address, and now tell me that the delivery company doesnt allow address changes usually so I gotta wait for them to return it with no recipient then redeliver it.

What a headache.

Edit: Oh this is news.

bolsonaro under investigation for harassing a whale

It says that the dead said a few weeks ago that he's happy his daughter died, but it turns out she is alive and is sitting next to him, can someone check if this is the same person from weeks ago, her name is Emily

It's her lmao https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2740111

Idiot neolib toady I know on another social media space brought up the Myanmar civil war going on now and referred to the country as having a "communist military government that has been mostly stable the last 70 years"

Fucking nitwits

Dublin Riots seem similar to those Ukraine-backed airport mobs in Dagestan. A hard right telegram/whatsapp group gets whipped into a frenzy and sicked on the streets. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if intelligence agencies were at least supporting this kind of thing.

What I'm Reading: Pushing back on pandemic revisionism.

Pandemic revisionism has been on my mind lately. It seems that many people incorrectly believe we didn’t achieve much, despite our efforts. How quickly we forget. The horrors of New York City in the early days of Covid-19 reflected a virus spreading without mitigation. Virtually everywhere other than New York City experienced Covid-19 dramatically differently—that is, other US cities encountered the novel coronavirus in the context of serious efforts to contain it. That’s why truckloads of dead bodies didn’t become a fixture anywhere outside of New York City’s early outbreak.

I’m not alone in worrying that people have forgotten all of this. Lately, New York Times writer David Wallace Wells has been using his column to interview some pandemic experts around this topic. His interviews with two colleagues with whom I have collaborated, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Michael Mina, are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in what lessons from the pandemic we should have learned—and these go beyond the usual platitudes.

So for this installment of “What I’m Reading,” I’m sharing another Wallace Wells interview. In this interview, Wallace Wells interviews the authors of a new book entitled “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.”

This is no ordinary interview. Wallace Wells clearly read this book and identified within it a key—and devastating—contradiction in its reasoning. Here is an early excerpt from the interview:

In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”

This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.

Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months? You write at length about PPE shortages and the problems of coordinating care between hospitals in the early months — would the country not have done better if it had addressed those problems quickly, or not suffered from them to begin with? Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12, getting shots into the arms of the vulnerable elderly before the first big winter surge? —David Wallace Wells, The New York Times.

Indeed, how can someone say we failed and also say that we could not have done any better?

[...] Wallace Wells surgically dissects a bizarre but increasingly popular viewpoint espoused in the book; that we did too much and that the benefits were nowhere near sufficient to justify them.

Dengism goes hard

After reading "we should take the foreskins of palestinians as war trophies" im wondering if it would be absurd to suggest that before the end of this there will be a call to use palestinian blood to make matzah for the troops in the field.