With friends like these who needs war criminals ?
"You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making the rules" --- Bob Dylan Wake Up

In 2019, Trump impulsively ordered Navy SEAL Team Six on a covert raid into North Korea to a listening device. Before landing, the SEAL team believed that a nearby boat had spotted them, so, naturally, they killed everyone onboard. Then they sank the boat and used knives to puncture the lungs of the Koreans' bodies so they would sink as well. Then the SEALS aborted the mission. The crew of the boat were civilians who'd been diving for shellfish. There were no weapons on board the fishing boat. Leading members of Congress were told about this entire botched affair and said nothing for four years...

Members of Congress who've known about this since 2021 but never told the public:
- Chuck Schumer
- Nancy Pelosi
- Adam Schiff
- Mark Warner
- Kevin McCarthy
- Mitch McConnell
- Devin Nunes
– Marco Rubio

thedailybeast.com/donald-trump…

nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy…

/HT #JeffreyStClair FB #USAWarCriminals
#NotAtWarMurderCriminals

Fruitcaketocracy: the New American Experiment Supporters must see him as a grandmother 👵 off her rocker mumbling nonsense. I mean, you don't let anyone mess with her, that I understand, but you hand her the nuclear football either. Ya know?

Just absolute madness from beginning to end. Trump: “Newsom didn't allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. You know they have tremendous amounts of water in California, which most people don’t know. They send the water out into the Pacific Ocean. So I demanded that to be open. If that were open during the fire, you wouldn't have had the fire because all the sprinklers would've worked in the houses. They had no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants. They wouldn’t have had the fires. They would have been put out after one house, two houses. But he stopped the water from coming in. And I had to send in the military to have that water opened, after the fires. And now that water, but he should have more, because they still restrict it. There’s something wrong with these people. There’s something really wrong.” There’s something really wrong with Trump’s brain…

facebook.com/share/1C91BBFL2h/
#JeffreyStClair #FruitCakeTocracy #TrumpsBrain #TrumpsMadness #CaliforniaWater

> 1. Ours is, above all, a *tragic* reality. Neither the most optimistic statistics nor the most ideologically contaminated explanations can disguise the situation of inhumanity and injustice in which our societies struggle. As long as we do not recognize the catastrophic state of certain societies in which the great majority of their people living if perpetual life-threatening situations, everything else, as a consequence, will be out of focus, and totally lack any semblance to reality.

--- Ignacio Martín-Baró (1974!!) in
_Towards a Society that Serves its People: The Intellectual Contributions of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits_ (1991)

#IgnacioMartinBaro #MartinBaro #ElSalvador #MurderedJesuits

... The pretense that we will find out whether or not Donald Trump is a sexual predator if the Epstein files are released is itself a kind of cover-up, since we already know he is – though I’m all for finding out exactly what it is he’s so frantic to hide. He was found liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll in a 2023 civil trial and has been credibly accused of groping, grabbing, and assault by numerous women. His worse-than-creepy behavior around the teenage girls in beauty pageants he managed is well-documented, as is his closeness to Epstein....

But in another sense the whole society is hiding something: that this violence is everywhere and it deeply shapes – or misshapes – our society. The statistics I cited above address the victims of specific crimes. But all girls and women are impacted by the reality that so many men want to harm us and these crimes could happen to any one of us. This violence affects the choices we make about where to go and when, what jobs to take, when to speak up, what to wear....

Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I’m all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.

meditationsinanemergency.com/e…

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

#RebeccaSolnit #EpsteinFiles #SystemicViolence #SystemicProblems

> The wise parent, at the present day, is likely to choose, if he can, some method of education for his children which is not in fact universal, and for the sake of experiment it is desirable that parents should have the opportunity of trying new methods. But they ought to be such as could be made universal, if found to produce good results, not such as must from their very nature be confined to a privileged few. Fortunately, some of the best elements in modern educational theory and practice have had an extremely democratic origin; for example, Madame Montessori's work began with nursery schools in slums. In higher education exceptional opportunity for exceptional ability is indispensable, but otherwise there is no reason why any child should suffer from the adoption of systems which might be adopted by all.

> 今日の賢い親は,可能であれば,実際,一般向け（万人向き）でない教育方法をわが子のために選ぶ傾向がある。そして,実験のためには,親たちが新しい方法を試してみる機会を持つことは望ましいことである。しかし,その新しい方法は,よい結果を生み出すことがわかった場合には,'万人向き'にされうるようなものであるべきであり,その性格上,ごく少数の特権階級に限定されるものであってはならない。幸いなことに,近代の教育理論と実際（実践）の最良の要素のいくつかは,極度に'民主的な起源'を持っている。たとえば,モンテッソーリ夫人（Maria Montessori, 1870-1952：イタリアの女医,幼児教育者）の仕事は,スラム（貧民街）の保育園から始まった。高等教育においては,特別の能力には特別な機会が不可欠である。しかし,その他の場合は,万人の利用できる制度を採用することによって,子供が苦しむ理由はまったくない。

- russell-j.com/beginner/OE01-02…

#モンレッソーリ夫人 #MariaMontessori #マリアモンテソーリ #MontessoriInSlums
#RussellOnMontessori #RusselOnEducation #OnEducation

On a public “grooming standards” webpage aimed at prospective Customs and Border Protection agents, the agency advises that any tattoos and brandings must be concealed if they are “obscene or gang-related.” In other words, agents are allowed to have the very markings for which Caraballo and others were disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag — as long as they keep them out of sight.
“It’s like saying ‘our gangsters are okay,’” Rosenow said. “But a young man fleeing persecution from his home country, a father of two little girls who likes to have ink on his body to commemorate his daughters, he is going to be subjected to this kind of horrifying shit?”
theintercept.com/2025/07/16/cb…

#CBPGangs #CBPTattoos #ICEThugs
See #GraeberOnGangs in Athens...

thenewinquiry.com/super-positi…

Neither Victims nor Torturers/Executioners --- Albert Camus

Hateful Monger Miller should be put in a nice little sandbox not put into policy positions..

... I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. Ha, ha...

It's from a video that was posted on social media yesterday by Breakthrough News
https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1945531629037850656

#JeffreyStClair on #StephenMiller #HateMonger #NeitherVictimsNorExecutioners #AlbertCamus
facebook.com/share/1B1eZbrQYh/

Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it.
...
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states: “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination.

- tomdispatch.com/everything-old…

#RebeccaGordon at #TomDispatch on #AbregoGarcia #KilmarAbregoGarcia #ICEThugs kidnappings as #ExtraordinaryRendition illegal under #InternationalLaw #USALaw #USATorture

You could call these jokes, if you think killing people is funny. Or you could call them thought experiments. Liddle suggested as much in his column: “I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.” This “humour” permits obscene ideas to seep into the range of the possible.
Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of “strategic mainstreaming”. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

#StartsAsAJoke #RightWingJokes #Monbiot #GeorgeMonbiot

Since the 90s Chomsky was mentioning how the USA turn toward the sort of economy it urged onto "our backyard" (Latin American) "client states" was making a situation where the only jobs were security guards....
' “The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.” "

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
#ICEThugs #USACrime #USALawEnforcement #USAImmigration #MoralInjury

Nothing is inevitable. Everything is resistible.

... the American "we" is different. In both racial demographics and political norms, this is not the country it was fifty or sixty years ago. But under authoritarianism, it's often not that people normalize atrocities, but that they're afraid to speak up, which is why strong early action matters.

facebook.com/share/1AofckF8jo/

#RebeccaSolnit #SolnitOnNormalization

Arendt argued as early as 1951 that the concentration camps in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) served as a model for the Third Reich’s bureaucratic organisation of forced labour and systematic murder: to suppress an anticolonial rebellion, the Germans had killed a hundred thousand Ovaherero and ten thousand Nama. Both Arendt and Aimé Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was published a year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, used the metaphor of the boomerang to describe the way violence that was once reserved for colonial subjects was turned on Europeans. For Mbembe, too, this history shows the West’s need for some racialised other – ‘a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner’ – to make sense

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/ke…

#HannahArendt #Arendt #ArendtOnColonialism #ArendtOnImperialism
/HT #RebeccaSolnit FB

> 幸福な人たちの最も一般的かつ明瞭な特徴と思われるもの,すなわち'熱意'（zest）を扱おうと思う。

> I propose to deal with what seems to me the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely zest.

...

> 人は,関心を寄せるものが多ければ多いほど,よりいっそう幸福になる機会が多くなり,また,ますます運命に左右されることが少なくなる。その理由は,何か一つを失っても,別のものを頼る（←別のものに撤退する）ことができるからである。

> The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.

russell-j.com/beginner/HA22-01…

#RussellOnZest #ConquestOfHappiness #RussellOnHappiness

Though the Trump administration often refers to the AEA removals as deportations, they do not resemble the codified judicial process of deportation.

Rather than deporting the men removed under the AEA back to their country of origin, the Trump administration sent them to a country foreign to them to serve out an indefinite sentence without ever convicting them of a crime or giving them an opportunity to challenge their removal or continued confinement.

...

Multiple investigations have found that a majority of those removed by the Trump administration do not have criminal records in the U.S., Venezuela or El Salvador and never violated U.S. immigration laws.

...

... the U.S. has paid El Salvador around $6 million to imprison the men for at least a year.

...

El Salvador said that the U.S. had exclusive responsibility over the men.

“In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters,” it said.

democracydocket.com/news-alert…

#ICEVenezuelans #ICEThugs #USAImmigrations #CECOT #DemocracyDocket #ImmigrationLaw #InternationalLaw

Hard to imagine gangs coming to rescue vulnerable immigrants like a cheap novel or SalamiAI illustration.. Would be nice though....

... to understand the often surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right-wing political movements, and the armed representative state. Ultimately, they speak the same language. They create their own rules on the basis of force. As a result, they typically share the same broad political sensibilities. Mussolini might have wiped out the mafia, but Italian Mafiosi still idolize Mussolini.... > In Athens, nowadays, there’s active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case it was clearly a political strategy: faced with the prospect of popular uprisings against a right-wing government, the police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs, then started giving tacit support to the fascists. For the far-right, then, it is in that space where different violent forces operating outside of the legal order interact that new forms of power, and hence of order, can emerge.

thenewinquiry.com/super-positi…

#GraeberOnGangs #GraeberOnAthens #GraeberOnSuperHeros #DavidGraeber

The ICE Thug stuff is worse than the Golf Course Goobers, where's the _Falling Down_ guy snapping in the right way at first and then getting caught before doing evil? I wonder if the _Training Day_ guys are saying anything about this??

> “Minutes before, there were more than 20 kids playing — then, the MILITARY comes through,” she wrote. “The SECOND I heard about this, I went to the park to speak to the person in charge to tell them it needed to end NOW. Absolutely outrageous.”
...
> One of the officials in the raid told the Associated Press that the raid was “going to be more overt and larger than we usually participate in,” though the news organization added that raid ended abruptly with no explanation.
> Bass, City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson later decried the raids at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

ktvu.com/news/ice-operation-ma…

#ICEThugs #LAMayor #LAMayorBass #MayorBass

望ましい４つの特質

合わさって人間の理想的な性格の基礎を形作ると思われる４つの特質を取り上げてみよう。即ち,活力（Vitality）,勇気（Courage）,感受性（Sensitiveness）,知性（Intelligence)の４つである（右図参照）。このリストは完全であると私は言うつもりはない。しかし,この４つの特質がそなわれば,我々は良い方向に進むことができると,私は考えている。さらに,若い人たちの肉体や感情や知性を適切に取り扱えば（世話をすれば）,これらの特質はいずれもごくありふれたものにできる,と私は固く信じている。順に考察してみよう

...

I will take four characteristics which seem to me jointly to form the basis of an ideal character; vitality, courage, sensitiveness and intelligence. I do not suggest that this list is complete, but I think it carries us a good way. Moreover, I firmly believe that, by proper physical, emotional and intellectual care of the young, these qualities could all be made very common. I shall consider each in turn.

russell-j.com/beginner/OE02-11…

#BertrandRussel #OnEducation #教育論 #バートランドラッセル

... Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles.

Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing “know your rights” information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries.

Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January’s wildfires have been “reinvigorated” to respond to the Trump administration’s raids, Hernandez said.

“In this moment, while we’re seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.

...

“Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,” she said.

Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area have reportedly been detained as part of immigration raids this month.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…

#EunissesHernandez #SolidarityInLA #LASolidarity #ICEThugs #USAImmigration

New research from a recent PRRI survey of more than 5,000 adults shows that 61% of Americans oppose the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya, without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court, including 36% who strongly oppose.[1] At the same time, majorities of some specific groups — Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Catholics, as well as Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers — support these actions.

Republicans (78%) are nearly eight times as likely as Democrats (10%) to favor the deportation of undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Roughly one-third of independents (35%) support these immigration actions by the Trump administration.
prri.org/spotlight/new-prri-po…

#uspol #ICEThugs #USAImmigration

... sexual harrassment in the workplace is not about out of control lust but about control itself, as an abuse of power and an exercise of it, meant to demonstrate the abuser can do whatever he wants, and the abused have no rights and what they want doesn't matter. Because we're a somewhat less hierarchical society than we once were, those abuses of power are (sometimes) less tolerated, and victims are (sometimes) more likely to have avenues in which to push back against violations of their rights. In other words, the line has been redrawn so that rights are more widely distributed, and while Cuomo surely knew this, he had also created a workplace in which he could get away with enforcing his own rules and overriding the law and the rights of others.

meditationsinanemergency.com/o…

#RebeccaSolnit #Cuomo #NewYorkCuomo #SexualHarassment

Iran could for example have directed its fury at Israel, which Iran views as responsible for its current predicament, or withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which unlike Israel Iran has ratified. It could additionally have chosen to prevent shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20-30 per cent of global energy exports pass, and coordinate efforts with AnsarAllah to similarly block Bab al-Mandab, shutting off the Suez Canal through which 10-15 per cent of global trade reaches its destination. While this would reduce Iranian oil exports to zero, and severely affect China (which imports most of its oil from the Persian Gulf), it would send prices at the pump in the US through the stratosphere at the height of the summer driving season. That won’t go down very well with the MAGA base which voted for Trump in significant part on account of his proclaimed opposition to costly and needless forever wars in the Middle East. ..
Iran is in a very unenviable position. Significantly weakened and still isolated, with strategic allies in Russia and China that are far less dependable than is the US for Israel, Tehran is damned if it acts, and damned – arguably more so – if it does nothing. At the same time Iran has spent many years preparing for precisely the scenario it is confronted with today, and it is most unlikely to prioritize self-preservation if the price is capitulation. Expanding the conflict to the region, and inflicting losses directly and indirectly on the US, appears to be its most likely course of action. In a calculated rather than impulsive fashion. ...

facebook.com/share/p/16crMoEHL…

#MouinRabbani #WarOnIran

Serious questions must be asked as to the longer-term strategy here. While Israeli officials have articulated a need for strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapons capability, Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (although it has threatened recently to quit) and key officials have regularly declared that nuclear weapons have no place in Iran’s strategic portfolio. ..

Israel is not a signatory to the treaty. In fact, it is thought to possess between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads. It’s hard to tell, as the country has maintained a steadfast policy of nuclear opacity, never actually admitting the extent of its nuclear capability...

The contours of global politics are changing before our eyes. Gone are the norms that have served as the bedrock of the so-called liberal international order. The risk is that while this period has itself featured tragedy and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, tearing up the rule book will be far worse.
juancole.com/2025/06/israel-us…
#SimonMabon #GlobalOrder
#NPT #IsraelNukes #IranNuclearProgram #JuanCole #JuanColeSite

Iran’s military budget in recent years has expanded from $10 billion a year around $15 billion annually, making it 25th in the world for such expenditures and putting it in the same range as Singapore and Uruguay. Algeria and Turkiye spend more, and Israel spends twice as much. Even if the war causes Iran to double its spending, it would still only match the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and would not reach the level of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Iran is a country of 92 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to some of these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population.

juancole.com/2025/06/things-st…

JuanCole #WarOnIran #IranMilitary

USA, more and more like Chile and other States under military dictatorship...

Locals praised the Dodgers when the team announced on social media that it had realized who actually buys their expensive tickets and sent Trump’s attack dogs on their way.
ICE and DHS, in contrast, have been snippy and defensive since they were shown the door and initially, and laughably, just posted tersely, “False. We were never there.” Then they admitted that Customs and Border Patrol were there as photos and videos flooded social media. Emily Phillips of an Echo Park Rapid Response network reported that the Feds said that they needed the stadium to process detainees since doing so out in the open at Home Depot would be “too dangerous.” It should frighten as well as offend everyone that such a cowardly, frightened group gets to be masked and armed and arrest people without warrant.
...
It would be a mistake to think that the Dodgers, whose ownership and (some) players visited the White House several months back and kissed the ring, are born again. This was done because of all the people who bravely stood up to the LAPD, the National Guard, the Marines, and whatever motley group of agencies have been diverted to California—a state that, like Greenland in the springtime, Trump clearly wants to seize. And yet the actions by the Feds here is also an escalation. They expect to be able to use a stadium to “process” those suspected of being undocumented—or even worse, that they can pull people out of the crowd at a ballgame and throw them into the backs of white vans. Given the history of stadiums being used across the globe as mass holding cells, with all kinds of small rooms perfect for “enhanced interrogations,” it would be particularly traumatizing for those connected to countries where sports arenas double as torture chambers.

thenation.com/article/society/…
#DavidZirin #LADodgers #DodgersStadium #ICEThugs

CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

fair.org/home/michael-galant-o…

#CounterSpin #immigration #uspol #MichaelGalant

Tana Petruzzelli, a volunteer with Detention Resistance, a human rights group who regularly accompany migrants and refugees to their court hearings, said she noticed a difference in how the court and law enforcement acted when the religious delegation was in the building.
“They bailed as soon as they showed up,” Petruzzelli said, referring to ICE officers. In a video shot by Petruzzelli and shown to Courthouse News, six or so ICE agents, all completely masked with black face coverings, can be seen gathering toward an elevator.

courthousenews.com/san-diego-b…

#BishopPham #PopeLeo #uspol #ICEKidnapping

> “What is the sense of all of the hatchery work and habitat restoration that we are doing as a Nation if 50 years from now the water temperature may be so high that none of the salmon will survive anyway?” I didn’t receive an answer from anyone that day...
> “Mr. Chairman you had asked us all a question about the relevance of hatchery & habitat work in spite of a future where the water temperature may be so high that nothing will survive. I apologize for not having an answer for you that day. I had to think long and hard about your question. The truth is the future of the salmon is so dark that we refuse to discuss it and we refuse to acknowledge it.”...
> Dam removal is the only option that exists in properly addressing the water temperature question.

counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/ro…

#SalmonFisheries #Dams #DamRemoval #ダムはムダ #JoDeGoudy #YakamaNation #ColumbiaRiver #ColumbiaRiverBasin #JeffreyStClair #RoamingCharges

> + Last Saturday, the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers told the singer Nezza to “do the national anthem in English tonight.” Instead, Nezza put on a Dominican Republic t-shirt and sang the anthem in Spanish. (Nezza was born in the US and is an American citizen.) Word of the Dodgers’ attempt to suppress Nezza ignited outrage among many in the LA Hispanic community. This is, after all, the team that evicted a predominantly Mexican community of 300 families from their homes in Chavez Ravine (without compensation) to build Dodger Stadium. Nezza’s defiant act and the local response to it almost certainly prompted the Dodgers to take this action on Thursday…

counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/ro…
#Nezza #LaDodgers #DodgersStadium #DodgersStadiumICE #JeffreyStClair

Hope!? Despair!?

Despite being primarily a children’s game, Roblox has evolved into a sort of emergent civic theatre for kids online. The game is now where thousands of children go to process major world news events through highly intricate role play. These simulations are how many young people experience news events, representing a shift towards more participatory forms of media.
...
This is not the first time Roblox has gotten political. In 2020, teenage Roblox users replicated the wave of protests against racial injustice and police brutality following George Floyd’s murder. Roblox users have also protested Israel’s assault on Gaza, staging pro-Palestine virtual protests in the fall of 2023.
...
In-game activism also isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Even before Roblox, children mobilized in other game-centric communities. In 2016, Club Penguin users protested Donald Trump’s election. Some kids used their avatars to express political dissent at a time when they weren’t even old enough to vote. Players in Animal Crossing and Roblox also staged protest events pushing Hong Kong’s pro-democratic movement in 2020.
Roblox boasts about 85 million daily active users globally. In December 2022, more than four in ten Roblox gamers were 12 years old or younger, and 60% of users were under the age of 16, according to data from Roblox.
...
I predict that digital protests will also have greater offline political impact as the digital realm increasingly becomes default reality. And it will be interesting to see what effect digital political expression in games like Roblox has on young people as they develop their nascent political ideologies.

teenvogue.com/story/kids-are-p…
#Roblox #TeenVogue #VirtualProtest #DigitalProtest

In one of the No Kings protest photos there was a sign "If Kamala was President we'd be at brunch." Reading that it's hard not to think it might be true for a lot of people, there would still be genocide in Gaza and ICE working away but it would all be managed with a bit more tact or subtlety... Maybe?

> It’s too easy to point at the low-hanging moral fruit without doing the work that those who are supposedly on the side of the angels need to do. There’s all this talk of being on the right side of history, but what does that mean? ‘‘The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’’ Who’s bending it? What are we doing to further that? If you just get rid of Trump, that doesn’t end this. It’s too easy to say: ‘‘I support this other guy. Therefore, I’m part of the solution.’’ Or: ‘‘You support that guy. Therefore, you’re the problem.’’ Now, that is in no way exculpatory to the supporters of those policies or that regime. My point was: What does that judgment get you? What is the accountability that we have for those who really do believe this is unjust but still accept the tacit societal arrangements?
...
> But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.

A meme that I probably saw from a "walled garden" site prompted the search that turned up this 2020 article interview:

nytimes.com/interactive/2020/0…

#JonStewart #uspol #MoralArc #MoralUniverse #DoBendWell

“To the Soldier Who Points a Gun at Me”

You think I’m here to die.
You think that’s all we know how to do—
bleed, bury, break.

But listen.

I grow things.
Tomatoes in rusted cans.
Hope in children who don’t know what the word means yet.
I build—walls, stories, mornings.
I fix roofs with one hand and hold my daughter’s hand with the other.

And you?
You carry a gun like it’s your purpose.
But I’ve seen men become ghosts
long before the trigger is pulled.

You call this land a threat.
I call it history .
The call to prayer. The school bell.
The pot of lentils boiling over.

Don’t mistake my softness for surrender.
I don’t need to shout to be strong.
The fig tree in my yard
has stood through three wars
without raising its voice.

You—
with your steel and fear,
your borrowed power—
you patrol streets looking for danger
and miss the beauty flowering between the cracks.

You fear death.
I fear forgetting how to live.

So if you shoot,
know this:
I wasn’t born to hate.
But I won’t vanish to make you comfortable.
I won’t flinch so you can sleep easier.

I am not your victim.
I am not your enemy.
I am the reminder
that even under occupation,
a man can love too fiercely to be erased.

• Sameh Shahrouj

H/T Cadfa (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association)

/HT #FilmsForAction FB account
#SamehShahrouj like #ThomasHardy
#TheManIKilled updated

> protesters associated with the anti-Trump movement—including those explicitly protesting ICE and Trump’s immigration policies—were extraordinarily nonviolent in their tactics.

In over 99.5 percent of protest events in April and May, we recorded no injuries, arrests, or property damage — an unprecedentedly tiny fraction for a movement of this size and geographic dispersion."

wagingnonviolence.org/2025/06/…

#EricaChenoweth #AntiTumpProtestd #AntiIceProtests
#WorldSpring #EarthSpring #USASpring #米国紫陽花革命

> “I can’t believe I even have to talk about these people. That’s how ridiculous it is,” says Timnit Gebru, an electrical engineer and founder and executive director of the ­Distributed AI Research Institute. “They were like some fringe group that nobody took seriously,” she says of how the tech billionaires who talked up AGI were viewed by those who worked in her field. “Everybody sort of laughed at them out of the room. But because of the money, the billions of dollars that were going into it, they started slowly taking over. Fast-forward to now, this conversation about superintelligence is basically mainstream.”

> Gebru argues, the conversation ignores what AI like ChatGPT really is: Not a form of intelligence — which, in and of itself, is almost impossible to define — but rather a large language model that simply scrapes the (inherently flawed) internet and predicts the most likely sequence of words. We are made to think that AI is “thinking,” but that’s just marketing, and misleading marketing at that. A machine that doesn’t really think at all can’t teach itself to think better. And it certainly can’t figure out how to alter the habitability of Mars.

> Likewise, though Altman claimed in January that nuclear fusion — potentially an inexhaustible source of energy — was only a few years away, the scientists working to bring it about scoff at that timeline (there’s a joke that it’s been 30 years away for the past 60 years). Crypto continues to have dubious (legal) utility as compared with other forms of currency, but in 2023, it gobbled up as much energy as the entire continent of Australia. In October, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the solution to the climate crisis was to use more energy: Since we aren’t going to meet our climate goals anyway, we should pump energy into AI that might one day evolve to solve the problem for us. (“Yeah, that’s a quote that he gave in public without, like, a mask over his face or anything,” says Becker. “And he still walks around, unashamed.”) In his first week in office, Trump invited Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to the White House to gleefully announce the building of 20 more AI data centers.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultu…

#TinmitGebru #Broligarchs #SalamiAI #TechBillionaires #TechBillionairePsychology
by #AlexMorris

> Ruling elites and power structures — from monarchies to military dictatorships to the U.S. corporatocracy — have routinely used “professionals” to control the population from rebelling against injustices so as to maintain the status quo. While power structures routinely rely on police and armies to subdue populations, they have also used clergy — thus, the need for liberation theology. And today, the U.S. corporatocracy uses mental health professionals to manipulate and medicate people to adjust and thereby maintain the status quo — thus, the need for liberation psychology.

> The U.S. corporatocracy, in order to control other nations — be they in Latin America, Native America, or elsewhere — has provided power and prestige for both individuals and institutions which meet the needs of the corporatocracy. Martin-Baró observed the following about North American psychology: “In order to get social position and rank, it negotiated how it would contribute to the needs of the established power structure.”

> The actions by U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists that contribute to the needs of the power structure for social position and rank have gotten even more blatant since Martin-Baró’s death....

> Even more powerful than positive-psychology manipulations in subverting resistance by soldiers to the U.S. military-industrial complex is the use of psychiatric drugs. According to the Navy Times in 2010, one in six U.S. armed service members were taking at least one psychiatric drug, many of these medicated soldiers in combat zones...

> In contrast to mainstream psychology, liberation psychology — which Martin-Baró helped popularize — challenges adjustment to an unjust societal status quo and energizes oppressed people to resist injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to help subjugated and demoralized people regain the energy necessary to recover the power that they have handed over to illegitimate authorities (see Get Up, Stand Up).

> Martin-Baró knew that there are political consequences to mainstream psychology’s restricting its research to quantifiable variables. He pointed out that when knowledge is limited to only quantifiable facts and events, we “become blind to the most important meanings of human existence.” Human dimensions such as commitment, solidarity, hope, and courage cannot be simplistically quantified but are what enable human beings to overcome injustice.

madinamerica.com/2014/11/assas…

#BruceLevine with #IgnacioMartinBaro #LiberationPsychology