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thinktosee · 11 months

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UKRAINE WAR AND ESCALATION IN AID OF?

As the war in Ukraine continues to drag on, with deaths and casualties numbering by the thousands, and refugees fleeing by the millions, (1) the fundamental question remains : what and who is this deathly carnage for?

The experts, and to some, the remunerated propagandists, will have us believe that it is about good versus bad folks. That is generally how war in the modern era has been singularly framed, regretfully. How is it that mass murder is a good thing?

Two current articles in the news media which speak of the seeming lack of global political leadership and its related inability to draw us away from “the precipice” as one visualized, should be carefully noted and acted upon as timely advisories against war and escalation.

The first news report touches on the general comments by Prof. Sergey Karaganov about the poor diplomatic relations between Russia and the Western Alliance. The piece then goes on to advance specific threats on the use of nuclear weapons.(2)

Professor Karaganov is an honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. The Council, a non-government public organization or so-called think tank, is tasked with helping to “develop and implement strategic concepts for Russia’s development, its foreign and defense policy, the formation of the Russian state and civil society in the country.” (3)

The title to the article, dated 14 June, 2023 and reported by the Russian news outlet, RT, seems deliberately provocative :

“Sergey Karaganov : By using its nuclear weapons, Russia could save humanity from a global catastrophe.” (2)

Prof. Karaganov is clearly of the realist school of thought, which in my book means no more than an opportunist. Threats of nuclear annihilation, in his calculation, are heightened means to achieving a desired outcome. I am not at all sure what objective he is promoting. If it is peace, as he claims, then it is a very dangerous or deadly game which he is calling on the Russian state to engage in. It is also quite possible that whilst speaking in an unofficial capacity, Prof. Karaganov is conveying a message from the state to NATO. A message possibly about a line in the sand.

Wars bring about extreme anxiety and desperation among the victims and also the policy makers. Threats made under these circumstances, can be difficult to slide back into the holster. They generally escalate, until as the speaker in the second article asserts, we reach a precipice. Question is – with these threats of the use of nuclear weapons, is it not probable that the world is at that very location?

“Leaders who have not had an experience of catastrophe sometimes believe that they have more options than they really do. That is characteristic of our time.” (4)

- Dr. Henry Kissinger, former United States Secretary of State, and doyen of the American foreign policy establishment, in an interview with the business news outlet, Bloomberg which was posted on June 16, 2023.

The second referenced article, a Bloomberg News interview with the 100-year old and surprisingly still very lucid Dr. Kissinger, covers a range of global challenges from the war in Ukraine to the tense relations between the U.S. and China over autonomous or some may prefer, independent Taiwan. With the latter, a major geopolitical issue, Dr. Kissinger feels that both sides should “step back from the ‘top of the precipice,’” because “wars between two superpowers cannot be won.” (4)

Both articles by two foremost foreign affairs experts - Prof. Karaganov, a Russian and Dr. Kissinger, an American, warn of conflict escalation between superpowers and the probable annihilation of humanity through the use of nuclear weapons. We should take note immediately and act responsibly to restore peace and goodwill.

As the propagandists in our midst continue to beat the drums of war and escalation to their everlasting personal benefit, I am reminded of the march of lemmings to the sweet music of the pied piper. The lemmings were not aware of the fate which awaited them ahead, and worse, the circuit breaker was indelibly left to the maestro, the pied piper. How was it possible that the lemmings could fall into a trance and then led to suffer a horrendous death?

Perhaps David was right after all. “Be Yourself!”, he said.

Sources/References

1. The calculus of war: Tallying Ukraine toll an elusive task | AP News

2. Sergey Karaganov: By using its nuclear weapons, Russia could save humanity from a global catastrophe — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

3..Council on Foreign and Defense Policy – Committee on International Affairs (interkomitet.com)

4. Watch A Conversation With Henry Kissinger at 100 Years - Bloomberg

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corruptedbonecharm · 3 years

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Less of an ask/prompt...more of a comment but

Because of your lovely little blog I adore Hypatia. I thought she was neat and all but you really showed me what was up and now im over here like "Hypatia ❤❤"

i am a hypatia propagandist first and foremost and a person second /j

in all seriousness though, thank you! i'm glad that me just sitting here blabbering about this fictional doctor lady has made at least some people start liking her more. it's what she deserves

#it means a lot really! ty this made me smile #asks #bards-anonymous

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surly01 · 3 years

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The Avatar of American Apartheid

The Trump years have revealed new truths about our relatives, neighbors, and friends. Or former friends. They have embraced the Avatar of American Apartheid.

We’ve had to open our eyes to the fact that some with whom we’ve happily shared parts of our lives stand revealed as racist to the core. Just fine with kidnapping and incarceration of immigrant children, forced family separations, and compulsory hysterectomies for some refugee women. OK with cancellation of decades of environmental regulation and climate change denial. OK with the negligent homicide that comprises the administration’s Covid-19 response. Enthused about deploying anonymized companies of military-style shock troops into the streets to “black bag” protesters and gas peaceful demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights. Fully embracing the author of 20,000-plus lies, the serial sexual assaults, the mind-bending attacks on institutions great and small.

Enough. I am not fine with any of the above, nor am I fine with those who are.

Some reading this might protest, “But I’m not a racist. I have a black friend/co-worker/neighbor, etc.” The election of the first Black President led many believe that we had entered a “post-racial society.” In arguments elsewhere about structural racism in the US, my opponents have cited Obama’s election as proof that race issues were now over. Would that it were so. Trump’s election has revealed American Apartheid as it really is. Howard Zinn and others have brought the receipts to show American history is a procession of mass murder and colonial appropriation, an uncomfortable truth we remain unwilling to hear. And the resurgence of the hard edge of neo-confederate militia rage and racist taunts from Charlottesville to Michigan highlight the dark stain on America’s soul.

America is as divided as it was in the 1850s, in that tense time of conflict before the Civil War. The windfall of territories gained in the wake of the War with Mexico led to arguments about how those territories would be apportioned between slave states and free states. This led to the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills abolishing slavery in Washington DC, admission to the Union of California as a free state, and enhancement of the Fugitive Slave Act. This last required northern magistrates to act as agents and slavecatchers for southern slave-owners. The Compromise also provided for existing territories to be admitted as “slave” or “free” depending on the inhabitants’ electoral will. This led to “Bleeding Kansas,” those battles waged between roving bands of abolitionists and slaveholders, and where abolitionist John Brown made his bones. A period of widespread domestic terror.

Much has been made of the rural-urban divide, which is actually the 21st-century code for racism. In a recent National Review column, Rich Lowry observed that Trump is

“the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between,” including “the 1619 Project.”

Those who live in Trump country, where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence, care little for what he does as long as it gives them license to hate liberals. The bigger the outrage, the louder the applause. Thus when Trump said, “he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue...,” he was correct. Non-Trump-cult members who wonder “how can they still back Trump after this scandal or the next” fail to understand the underlying motivating factor of his support. It’s “fuck liberals.” Since according minorities their constitutionally-guaranteed rights would require an acknowledgement of America’s actual history of racism, it is vigorously opposed by change-resistant conservatives determined to preserve the prerogatives of white entitlement.

Attempts to have a logical, rational conversation with Trumpists invariably reveals a person who believes their well-being depends upon avoiding things they’d rather not know. Or who will replace evidence with an alternative set of facts, generally created of whole cloth and breathed into life like a golem through repetition in right-wing media.

Consider QAnon, that hatchery of right-wing fucknuttery. Scratch their “Save the Children” marketing disguise and find revealed a narrative similar to that in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. Central to the mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

Consider the current package of accusations:

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Thus are “The Protocols” repackaged by QAnon for Americans largely ignorant of history. Some have even suggested that QAnon is a Nazi cult, rebranded. What is appalling is that so many of our neighbors, relatives, and “friends” are so credulous.

As David Pollard has observed,

Trump’s support among white males remains basically unchanged over the past four years. This, not Republicans, is his real base — a clear majority of white males continue to support Trump, and it hasn’t been that long since they were the only people allowed to vote. Whites, and male whites moreso, have voted against every Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And let’s be clear — I didn’t say, old white males. Young white males of all voting-age groups remain committed, almost as much as their older counterparts, to support Trump. Their entrance into the voting age cohorts has barely caused a ripple in the plurality of white males supporting Trump. That may surprise you until you consider that a disproportionate number (about half) of young voters are nonwhite (only a quarter of boomers are nonwhite), so looking at the entire youth cohort’s seemingly progressive attitudes obscures the reality that most young whites hew to the same extreme right-wing politics that the majority of old whites subscribe to; there’s just fewer of them.

We’ll leave it for you to consider that it means that a majority of white males of all ages are knowingly prepared to vote again for a blatantly corrupt candidate, a pathological liar, mentally deranged, uninformed, racist, sexist, utterly without principle, and increasingly untethered to reality. One whose “White House Science Office” takes credit for ‘ending’ the pandemic as infections mount to all-time highs.

But after 20,000 lies, who’s left to quibble?

“I love the poorly educated.” Donald J. Trump

Trump may lose the election, but white American males (and some true-believing females) aren’t going anywhere. They are the product of our systemically racist, sexist, patriarchal culture, born to preserve the prerogatives of white men of property while denying justice to the nonwhite, the native, the immigrant, the female, the “weak.” While they also control the courts, the banks, the legal system, and law enforcement, created in their likeness to support and preserve white male power, they are quick to snap into a well-practiced victim pose whenever challenged.

This past summer, members of the ShutDownDC movement protested at Chad Wolf’s home. They said,

“We know there are no career consequences for these men and women. We know there are no financial consequences for these men and women. We know there are no legal consequences for these men and women. We must make social consequences for these men and women. We must make it uncomfortable for them. We will not be good Germans. We will not be the people who sat by and watched our neighbors commit these atrocities and said nothing because their kids were home.”

The differences between both sides of a culture war are as strong as the conflict between “slave” and “free” in the 1850s, and are likewise framed in moral absolutes. No matter what happens on or after November 3, Trumpism remains with or without Trump. How will we live with its followers?. And whether or not there are “consequences” for their actions, the stink of Trump will never wash away, and what has been seen can’t be unseen. Nor will it be forgotten.

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celticnoise · 4 years

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There are a handful of journalists in this country upon who you can always rely.

One of them is Gary Ralston.

There is a consistency to his work that you can put the mortgage on.

Unfortunately, we are not talking about the highest of quality here.

If you want sophomoric writing, village idiot opinions and pro-Sevco spin he is the go-to-guy at The Record.

Today’s piece from him is remarkable in every above respect.

Above all, it is an endorsement of the Ibrox point of view, pushing like a hard drug every conspiracy theory in vogue over there, even those which have already been shot down by those at their very centre.

That is Ralston’s day job, no matter what his official contract of employment should say.

This man is a Sevco propagandist. And today he excelled himself.

Entitled “Rangers’ call for SPFL inquiry is the only way to restore trust after voting fiasco”, you already get the gist of it. Suddenly, the club that has lied, smeared, threatened and up the stakes of hate are the paragons of virtue here, and the guardians of trust.

You would laugh if this wasn’t such a serious moment for our national sport.

“The beautiful game has been reduced to an ugly caricature of a sport in which fair play is just another commodity to be bought and sold on a market of blatant self-interest,” he squeals early in the piece. You would think, to read that, that every club who had voted Yes were doing so for utterly selfish reasons whilst those who voted No did so with no agenda whatsoever … except that’s actually the reverse of what actually happened.

It is the clubs who voted no for whom self-serving motives are the most obvious.

And since when is it not representative of “fair play” to call the leagues after 30 games based on what has happened over the length of the campaign so far?

This is the weakest part of any argument against ending the season now; the “void” supporters would disenfranchise every club and every supporter in the land and do so under the cover of “sporting integrity.”

It is like a bad joke.

Does Ralston prefer – as some at his paper do – voiding the campaign?

He never says in this piece, but ending the season as-is and voiding it are the two options left when you conclude, as most reasonable people do, that there will be no more football until August.

“The corporate governance of the SPFL has been woeful, their arrogance and disdain for member clubs a shameful blight for an organisation that should exist for the many, not just the very chosen few,” Ralston writes.

But you know what? The way this voting saga has unfolded may give the impression of unprofessionalism, but the motion itself was right on.

It is “the many” who spoke loud and clear about wanting the campaign ended so that they could get their hands on much needed funds.

It was “the few” who tried to prevent that, foremost amongst them the club with the second biggest income in the league.

This was not a revolt of the little people, coming out swinging for fairness and justice … this was an attempted coup led by those in the officer corps, at the very heart of the Scottish football power structure.

The vote had the overwhelming support of the clubs.

Ralston is not singing their praises but crying the blues for a cabal which was defeated in a shame-faced effort to derail the wishes of the rest for their own ends. Sevco is the guiltiest of all of them in that regard, with nothing left to play for and doing what they did out of spite and anti-Celtic sentiment.

“(Events) around the vote last Friday night that gave Nelms his release clause to shaft Inverness and Partick Thistle deserve more than just a glib line in an official statement,” the piece says.

But if he wants to talk about being shafted, how about the way Inverness has released private communications in an effort to shame Dundee and promote the idea of a conspiracy? Someone on that chat has also released transcripts to several Ibrox fan sites.

I believe that might well be the most disgraceful act in all of this.

And it’s now that Ralston’s strains against his strait jacket with his first stab on behalf of the Ibrox club, targeted against the SPFL CEO.

“The SPFL say they will launch an in house enquiry, but it’s too important an issue for transparency and supporter confidence to allow chairman Murdoch MacLennan, whose impartiality has already been questioned by (Sevco), to mark his own homework.”

Let’s imagine for a second that MacLennan said what he’s alleged to have said once upon a time; I’m still not sure why Sevco wants to bring that up now. Because this motion had the sum total of nothing to do with the Ibrox club. To read Ralston you’d think this was all done to shaft them, when in fact this was a vote on much bigger issues.

Sevco did propose their own counter-motion, but when the club’s own opening statement on it freely admits that they knew it lacked competence why are we even still debating it? To my eyes, they quite blatantly manufactured a controversy when it looked, initially, as if the SPFL proposals would pass at the first go and they have been stoking it ever since.

“The decision of chief executive Neil Doncaster – he really is the Teflon Don – to be party to a call to sanction the result of the ballot before all votes had even been received appears a sinister manipulation,” Ralston adds.

I don’t know a single person who does not think Doncaster is a prize idiot.

But for a national title to dredge a paranoiacs phrase like that up from the basement of the fan forums of Sevconia is ridiculous.

It’s an allegation without a shred of proof … “sinister manipulation” for God’s sake? He sounds like one of the nuttier writers over at Ibrox Noise Up.

This is his second to last paragraph, and it sums up the general stupidity of the whole piece.

“An independent investigation is a must to restore fan confidence but unless other clubs, particularly Hibs and Aberdeen, decide there are concerns to address then the next football crisis is just around the corner.”

And right there is the central thrust of it; this is really all about one club and their concerns and those concerns have nothing to do with the greater good of the game. I have yet to hear a single official at a single club support the idea of voiding the campaign, and most clubs are perfectly happy with the way the vote went. For Sevco to get even a minor victory here they need allies, but their behaviour over the last week has repelled many clubs.

Chris Sutton summed it up with a late Tweet;

“Democratic vote… overwhelming result… frustration must really be the wheels came off after the winter break… but blame everyone and everything else…”

It is easier to get the word out if you have a pet hack to do your bidding. We might not be impressed by Ralston’s scribblings, but I am betting the PR department at Ibrox, who are floundering right now like a drowning man in stormy seas, are happy enough.

Celtic should be taking note of all this, and I’m sure we are. We aren’t named directly as conspirators trying to do Scottish football harm but you don’t need codebreakers from Bletchley Park to work this out. It is the subtext to the whole piece and to numerous other articles I’ve read in the past few days … as if this whole thing were confected for our benefit.

Sevco is desperate right now, so we can assume that the PR war over all this is just getting started.

We had better be watchful, every single step of the way, and ready to correct every false narrative.

As Scottish football goes through the current crisis it is important to keep up with developments and the key issues. We are determined to do so, and to keep you informed as well. Please subscribe to the blog.

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