davel

joined 2 years ago
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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The US is run by the capitalist class, and from their point of view China is “authoritarian,” because the Chinese state isn’t allowing the capitalist class to run China.

That’s what Western governments and Western corporate media really mean by “authoritarian” & “totalitarian” governments: that Western capitalist neocolonization is being stymied by those governments.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 7 points 9 months ago

Please understand the distinction between the destruction of the state of Israel and the destruction of the people of Israel. The example you were just given was the destruction of the state of South Africa.

a two state solution is fair and striving for peace and understanding between the two parties is desirable.

That sounds nice, but Israel wants no such thing and never has, despite its past claims to the contrary.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Because you’re unable to distinguish between a state and a people, you’re unable to imagine anything but the eradication of a people, even though the example of the state of South Africa was just given to you.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 13 points 9 months ago

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out 👋

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

The good guys are the citizens

I’m going to have to stop you right there, because the Palestinians are not the citizens of any state: they are a people being occupied, apatheided, and genocided by the state of Israel. So there’s a “very, very simple truth” for you.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

CIA "Cooked The Intelligence" To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016 Russia didn't fear Hillary Clinton. “It was a relationship they were comfortable with,” some CIA analysts believed, but intelligence was suppressed. On the fall of the last great Russiagate myth

“They cooked the intelligence,” says a source close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal, whose full findings have until now been blocked from release. “They made it look like Putin supported Trump,” the source added. “The evidence points the other way.”

The HPSCI investigators, who worked out of a “small office in Langley” and had broad access to classified documentation and witnesses from the CIA and other agencies, found U.S. intelligence analysts had “a lot of stuff about the Russians calling Trump ‘mercurial,’ ‘unreliable,’ and ‘not steady.’” On the other hand, the agency had information that Russians saw Hillary as “manageable and reflecting continuity. It was a relationship they were comfortable with.”

“We looked at the report and the sourcing they used to evaluate the sourcing,” we were told. “When we dug further to look at the data available to them that they didn’t use, and it overwhelmingly contradicted their conclusions that Russia supported Trump.”

The effort to manufacture the Intelligence Community claim that Russians had a “clear preference” for Trump” was led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, whom sources also implicate in an unprecedented effort to place more than two dozen Trump aides and associates under surveillance prior to the election. U.S. intel leaders like Brennan coaxed foreign allies, particularly from so-called “Five Eyes” security partners like the United Kingdom, into “making contacts and bumping” Trump associates throughout 2016.

A crucial conclusion of the HPSCI investigators was that both the surveillance campaign and the rapidly assembled ICA were conducted for political reasons. This was not a national security investigation that turned political. It began as a political enterprise.

“They thought they could damage Trump,” the source said. “It had nothing to do with our relationship with Russia. It was just leveraging capabilities to undermine this rookie unprepared Trump campaign, because they were easy marks.” This information squares with a report from a little-noticed interview of FBI Special Agent William Barnett, who was part of both the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe and the subsequent Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller. On September 21, 2020, Barnett told investigators in a different review that the initial belief that the Trump campaign was “penetrated by Russians” was “opaque,” a case theory based on “supposition after supposition.” He described a lack of predication and a “get Trump” attitude among investigators, who were guided by what he called “astro projection,” which led them from dead end to dead end in an Ahab-like search for an elusive “quid pro quo.”

The information obtained by Public and Racket is based on information from three sources close to the HPSCI investigation, who described reports and internal documentation assiduously kept from the public for years. Though gathered by Republican-appointed investigators, the data came from the U.S. intelligence community’s own records of the Trump-Russia investigation, just like another probe conducted by the same office that has already been proven true – the FISA abuse investigation.

Virtually every major contention of the original Russiagate probe has now been debunked, from the notion that the Trump campaign had a secret “back channel” to the Kremlin in 2016, to the idea that a Trump aide was an “agent of a foreign power,” to accusations of “collusion” with the GRU or Russian hackers. Even the idea of election “interference” in 2016 was largely a press fiction. As noted in the Columbia Journalism Review opus about the Trump-Russia scandal by Jeff Gerth, reporters from papers like the New York Times used phrases like “the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history,” and even the Pulitzer Committee commended prize-winning Times and Post reporters for their coverage of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connection to the Trump campaign.”

Not even Brennan’s team ever used the term “interference.” “Influence campaign” was as far as they went, and no connection between the Trump campaign and “influence” activities was ever established.

There are still large segments of the population that believe there was a Russian campaign to help Trump and avoid a Clinton presidency. If there’s any proof that this conclusion is true, Republicans and Democrats alike should be demanding its release. Figures like Brennan, Comey, and James Clapper should especially be pounding a table to get that data out.

Absent such evidence, the HPSCI report — especially considered in light of all the surrounding evidence that dissent was suppressed — should allow us to consider that myth exploded. The still-blocked raw research needs to come out, however. In an election year in which the question of who violated norms first is paramount, voters need to see everything.

“It will come down to the documents,” is how one source put it. “The public needs to see them all.”


[–] davel@lemmy.ml 9 points 9 months ago

In the face of genocide, you chose to dodge the question.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (13 children)

This simplistic one size fits all argument falls flat when one side is being occupied and ethnically cleansed by the other side. It implies that Hamas is the “bad guy” and all other occupied Palestinians are the “good guy,” and it implies that non-military Israeli settlers are the “‘good guy.” But the truth is that the great majority of adult Israelis are militant settler-colonizers; and that Palestinians have the legal right under UN law to struggle against their occupiers by any means necessary, including armed struggle; and that Israel, as an occupier, has no right to “self defense.”

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago

Normalcy bias hasn't led to anything disastrous or untenable happening yet

That’s a very strong assumption that I doubt would hold up under serious investigation of the historical record.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I live in a deep $COLOR state, not a swing state, so my vote has no effect on the Electoral College anyway.

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