The civil liberties stans try to make sense of Katherine Maher, the new president of NPR, ex-CEO of Wikimedia, ex-Atlantic Council, ex-State Department, and current member of the Council of Foreign Relations. But as usual their liberal ideology doesn’t quite get them there. They see that Maher has a relationship with the ruling class, the state, and imperialism, and they see her coöptation of class & race consciousness while being a beneficiary of her own whiteness and class position, but they’re unable to see the relationships between the capitalist class, the state, whiteness, and imperialism. How they fail to note that NPR is state-affiliated media is beyond me.

They talk about the new FISA expansion bill (which was signed into law today) as well, which to their credit they see as related.

America This Week, April 19, 2024: "To Build a Surveillance State" (transcript). A paid subscription is ostensibly required, so: https://files.catbox.moe/e7xim5.mp3

The Grayzone on Maher previously:

• Jun. 2020: Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO
• Oct. 2023: US regime change activist named Web Summit CEO after founder forced out for condemning Israeli ‘war crimes’

plaintext $ curl -sI https://lemmygrad.com | grep '^location:' location: https://jfedpgh.org/israel-emergency-relief $

Found via Jamie Zawinski (“JWZ”): Thread federation >This is a great (long) look at the issues around federating between Mastodon and Threads from several angles, and manages to do so without letting the white-hot rage at Zuckerberg's fetid empire shine through and overpower the discussion of practical considerations.

>The real issue is not only that AI doesn't work as advertised, but the impact it will have before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone. AI is being used as form of 'shock doctrine', where the sense of urgency generated by an allegedly world-transforming technology is used as an opportunity to transform social systems without democratic debate.

If your “bio” contains a table like so, your username, on Hexbear, will appear as USERNAME [XXX/YYY]@lemmygrad.ml

||| |---|---| | Pronouns | XXX/YYY |

I haven’t looked at Hexbear’s source code, nor experimented further, so I don’t know what limitations there are, but I know you can add other rows to the table without breaking the feature.

…otherwise it’s a sparkling apartheid.

>Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel. > >On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away. > >The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel. > >Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1714090576076038360

TL;DR: Flatten the buildings and then use upgraded American bunker buster bombs, which may or may not be able to penetrate deep enough. And then ultimately, “The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.” [Edit: in other words, their final solution is ethnic cleansing].

>The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

He seems to corroborate something I suspected: >The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.

I’d paste the article in full if I could without potentially exposing Lemmygrad to legal troubles 😬

How to Read Donald Duck

• Wikipedia: How to Read Donald Duck
• The Guardian: How we roasted Donald Duck, Disney's agent of imperialism

>The European parliament is expected to fight off attempts by France and other EU member states to introduce controversial laws that would allow spyware to be inserted on journalists’ phones on the grounds of national security.

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism: >The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

For the still meme confused: Survivorship bias

(Stolen from @RoseTintedGlasses@matapacos.dog)

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1901171

> Workers Strike Back was started by Socialist Alternative Seattle councilmember Kshama Sawant. > >On Strike is the video broadcast of Workers Strike Back, hosted by socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Bia Lacombe. We’ve seen more protests and strikes than any time in a generation, but rarely do we hear about them from the perspective of working people and our movements. On Strike provides an independent socialist analysis and strategy to rebuild a fighting labor movement and campaign for a new mass party for workers and young people.

>The West is writing a script about its relations with China as stuffed full of misdirection as an Agatha Christie novel. > >In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House. > >But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse. > >The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years. > >While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message. > >The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”. > >In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence. > >The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China. > >[…]