junebug2

The direct comparison of Western media treatment for Palestinians and for Ukrainians was sickening. How ever much you hate the imperial stenographers, it isn’t enough. The psychologist quoted by the New York Times in particular made me have to step away from the book. It’s so bewildering that there are philology and race science books from two hundred years ago that have more impact on what can be said about current events than any history or economics. i guess that’s orientalism at work. The median liberal idealist is so wrapped up in stories that they think Eastern Europe and the Levant are mythical, far off locations, and the happenings there have to be relayed by specialized, expert translators. It’s such a suffocating épistémè that even the author and other writers who rejected American-washing Shireen Abu Akleh still felt the need “to exculpate her from the crime of being Palestinian” with her press equipment. i think it’s very telling that the approved, Zionist experts referred to her as “armed with [her] camera”. The master translators that work at Western news outlets and universities can take any victim and make them a perpetrator, or vice versa. And every single thing that happens east and south of the Imperial Core is incomprehensibly foreign to the Anglophone and Francophone common sense, so you have to listen to the ‘experts’. It’s almost sublime, in the sense of a small figure staring at a tidal wave of lies encompassing the horizon.

There’s a school of thought in critical theory that the whole idea of the Western citizen (and all the brainworms tied up in that) is defined by opposition to the subjugated. In the United States specifically, the white citizen individual is defined as the opposite of enslaved Black bodies and dispossessed indigenous nations. Notably, Black Americans have been enslaved and indigenous people have had their land stolen for the entire history of the USA, and the state continuously reproduces those categories in order to survive. Of course, the only way to do that is constant violence. You have to take Hegel’s master-slave dialectic a little too seriously to see this as conferring humanity instead of legal status, but there’s good evidence that’s how the author meant it. If you don’t exist within the category of citizen, you aren’t actually seen as an individual. i’ve read a bit about how Hegel and Kant were first anthropologists and race scientists before writing their works of philosophy. The definition of a western or european citizen is ultimately rooted in white supremacy. The settler citizen is free, the opposite of the slave or bonded laborer. The settler citizen has land, the opposite of the dispossessed native. i bring up Yankeestan first because i’m from there, so its easy for me to talk about it.

The Zionist project is ultimately a European colonial project, and i think the same pattern holds. The Palestinians are obviously the natives being dispossessed of their land, and in many cases Palestinians do menial low paying jobs (which i understand to be one of few available sources of income thanks to Zionist policy). There are also laborers imported from Thailand and the Philippines to do manual labor that is beneath the dignity of Zionist citizens. The citizen is defined by religion, by skin color, by land ownership, and by employment. A great deal of cultural and psychological effort goes into making these categories, and the boundary of the circle is defined by everything outside of it. When El-Kurd says that the humanizing process accepts implicitly that “that the oppressed must demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity, first and foremost. Otherwise occupation, subjugation, police brutality, dispossession, surveillance, and “extrajudicial executions,” would be excusable or even necessary,” i think that’s a necessary principle for citizens of a settler colony. If the oppressed don’t basically deserve it, if the stereotypes aren’t mostly true, then the self-conception and mental stability of the settler citizen collapse.

El-Kurd also points out the theoretical base for humanization is in bourgeois values. The idea that membership in a common humanity comes from a checklist of certifications is ultimately something that will only help those with money. It imagines “a world where the rich can master roles the poor cannot imagine auditioning for”. I think this bourgeois humanization also exists in contrast to the definition of a citizen i’ve been discussing. You don’t need any amount of money or any degrees or to be actually correct about anything for settler citizens to ‘circle the wagons’ if you are already one of them. The Zionist soldier ‘kidnapped’ out of his tank and Carolyn Bryant (the woman who got Emmett Till lynched) are both citizens according to their societies. They are/ were individuals with value and potential, and so settler society calls them victims regardless of their actions or the facts. By contrast, their enemies are seen as violent thugs who are beyond reason, lurking among the faceless masses who secretly sympathize. The outsider or the non-citizen cannot be individuated or have reasonable complaints in the eyes of the citizen. The idea of humanization is a trap, to waste the energies and resources of non-citizens so that a select few of them can get conditional scraps of citizenship.

A 2021 white paper from the Open Nuclear Network, a Vienna-based anti-nuclear weapons NGO, claims

• the DPRK is repurposing a 3000 ton submarine for ballistic missile launch
• the first small, experimental DPRK submarine missile launch was in 2016
• it’s possible for a 4-5k ton nuclear submarine to be built in the near future

An article from the Stimson Center, a Washington DC think tank founded in 1989, from earlier this year about this submarine claims

• a 5-8k ton nuclear submarine is under construction, but “several years away”
• it’s about twice the diameter of the largest known indigenously produced DPRK submarine
• Kim Jong Un has made several announcements about building a nuclear powered submarine over the last decade
• the DPRK has ballistic missiles with a range of 12,000 km, capable of hitting North America from the Korean peninsula
• also the article is confident that there’s no way the DPRK could ever make a nuclear engine

The upshot is that the DPRK has a nuclear diad (dyad?) now. Even if land-based launch facilities are obstructed or a surprise attack from the US gets off, submarines loitering off the coast would be able to send a nuclear response. This is different from previous tactical missile submarines, which would only have a range of few hundred kilometers. It’s likely unfeasible for a small number of submarines to move across the Pacific. While it is possible to evade many sensors by diving deep enough, the DPRK does not have much experience with cruising capabilities or blue water performance in general. They operate a large number of submarines, but most are midget and diesel-electric. The Korean People’s Navy has a large number of landing craft and riparian vessels, as well as an East and a West coastal fleet. It is essentially a brown and green water navy. This submarine will most likely be used for something resembling the UK’s Trident program. Trident has a nuclear armed submarine go on a wide patrol at all times, with 4 submarines in the program to keep one at sea at all times. The main complication will be that the DPRK is quite close to Japan and Samsung Korea, while the UK is hardly sending submarines into a hostile Atlantic.

i would be comfortable with the pace you’ve described or slightly increasing it.

i was especially struck by the section after the subheading “The thief holds a gavel,” in which El-Kurd says that those who engage in a politics of appealing to morality are proceeding from an analysis that power is immutable and built on stone instead of “an imposing yet tenuous entity resting on sand”. i think this is correct, and also an important thing to consider with the Palestine Action members currently engaged in a hunger strike in the UK. In the words of Kwame Ture, in order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. Palestinians can, through the power of idealism, sometimes change their role to ‘victim’. This still exists within and reproduces the Zionist and Western narrative, though. It reinforces on the one side the image of the victim, and on the other side does not challenge the image of the terrorist. As a Westerner, i think the official “victim” narrative essentially amounts to saying “something sad but completely unavoidable has happened, please give money or volunteer with a church or NGO”. It’s how people make ads for malaria nets and hurricane relief, and pretending that 2000 lb bombs and cement checkpoints are as natural as mosquitoes and monsoons completely washes the hands of the USA and “israel”. This also connects to the author’s consideration of how the constant discussion of Palestinian death is naturalized, both in the sense of it being commonplace and in the sense of it being compared to natural disaster or disease.

To engage with the airs and masks the West puts on (in narrative, in interviews, in the academy, in the discussion of so-called human rights) is to use “the tools made available by the institution, . . . in line with the institution’s logic.” El-Kurd also says that the above engagement with power is one tool or facet among many. It’s all but necessary to shop around your arguments and positions to try and make them sound appealing. It seems to me that he saying that the error is assigning supreme significance to the politics of moral appeal, and specifically the tactics associated with casting one’s self as a better victim. There was obviously a lot more in the chapter, but i don’t know if i have coherent thoughts about it.

The US Civil War is seen as an act of nation building, which is why in the documentary movie “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” Nick Cage says that before the Civil War people said ‘the United States are’ and after ‘the United States is’. More seriously, at least in liberal theory the South was a nation. From a paid article by Big Serge, someone i would call a well read liberal:

The US Civil War was, as I would argue, the single most consequential act of empire building in modern history. The simple fact was that the Confederate South was a nation, or at least was in the process of becoming one, with a wealthy agrarian economy, peculiar social forms, and a patrician leadership caste that was largely alien to the industrial, urban north. Southerners affirmed their membership in this emergent nation with exceptionally high levels of military participation, the willingness to endure extreme privation, and a new schema of southern symbols and hagiography. This emerging southern nation was strangled in its cradle by the powerful north and then re-integrated into the Union in a complex political settlement - the cost of which was abandoning southern blacks to a postwar racial caste system.

More materially, the capital used to jumpstart the London Stock Exchange ultimately originated in the primitive accumulation of chattel slavery in the US South. The low cost of the cotton made mills in Liverpool profitable, and that allowed for finance to emerge. The Confederacy thought during the war that Britain would bail them out because of their economic inter-linkages. Now, Britain was actually engaged in imperial expansion in Egypt and India for more cotton under their control, and didn’t really mind. But for over 200 years, slaves worked in particular parts of North America to produce raw materials and those were processed in England.

By contrast, the Union was a shipbuilding pit stop in colonial times. Lumber, pitch, hemp, shipyards, and rum distillation were what the Empire wanted. The various English colonies in North America had different laws and different economic purposes. Famously, before the war, the South preferred to send cotton to England instead of mills in the North, effectively subsidizing their competitors. The rules and structure of settling westward and stealing more native land were also bound by the competition of northern yeomen farmers and proto-industry vs southern plantation owners and highly militarized lower classes.

It might be wrong to technically call them a nation, but the alternative would be something like “for 100 some years, half the country fought tooth and nail for how much they loved slavery”. Better PR to call them a totally separate enemy. And since this is the Union that made slavery legal in prisons where settler citizens can’t see instead of banning it, PR counts for something.

When i was studying philosophy, panpsychism was treated a bit like skepticism in general. Fascinating and compelling arguments, but not practicable. It is true that logic is a closed system, so you can’t really determine a priori that the sun will rise tomorrow. No one actually lives like the sun isn’t showing up. We have no idea what the cause or mechanism of consciousness is, and as such there is no reason to assume that certain types of cell or an arrangement of them are related to it.

In the literature, the idea that the exact specific cells of your body make up your consciousness or that there’s a specific pattern of cells that make it up are variants of hard materialism, with respect to consciousness. They are also wrong (One’s cells replace themselves, so if consciousness was in the specific cells you’d get ship of theseus’ed. We also don’t act like many brain injuries change a person.)

With all that above in mind, the argument that there’s no inherent reason to treat of pile of wires as different from a pile of ganglia or neurons was one of those arguments that someone came up with as a counterpoint more than a real point. The only ‘professional’ philosopher that adheres to panpsychism is David Chalmers, and some people in the field think he’s doing a long running bit.

my personal view is that panpsychism claims that elementary particles (either the normal ones we know or some new ones) have a mental or proto-mental character. This is to stay that a bunch of particles together give rise to complex forms. This is another way of taking materialism (in philosophy of consciousness, zero relation to political theory) at its word and treating consciousness as something that developed from lava-cooked, meteorite-seeded primordial soup. We already think proteins and organelles and organisms are increasingly complex combinations of these particles, so if consciousness is an organic phenomenon, why wouldn’t it follow a similar path?

i think the point of this is to demonstrate that materialism (brain is conscious experience and changing one will definitionally change the other) is at least an incomplete picture. i definitely don’t agree with it personally, but i do think it’s an interesting idea in the contemporary philosophical conversation about the mind.

the only reason i heard about Mamdani in the first place was his anti-zionism, and every appearance he’s had since then has been backtracking it. no magic words, just a very bad sign for his integrity and true feelings. the United States of America is directly threatening Venezuela with military intervention, and has been strangling Cuba for 50+ years. this is not having issues with a country in a vacuum, or an academic interview. this is the person claiming to represent the furthest left tent pole in the media laundering the current imperialist regime change project. are we seriously calling a succ dem mayor AES? while actively warmongering?

Ten Myths About Israel (sic) is a good summary or takedown of the narrative zionists have of their history. Pappé is an “israeli” historian with good opinions (acknowledges that the Nakba was ethnic cleansing, admires the courage of Hamas after al-Aqsa Flood), and the text is pretty snappy. Like some of the myths are covered in less than ten pages. People might have read this one though, cause that link is pulled from the news thread like two years ago

It’s a fools errand to try and predict when the war will end, but carpoftruth posted this mil blog article a few days ago. It’s a good summary, and mostly brain worm free (beyond considerations of the essential, unconquerable Russian spirit).

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, the gist of it that the USA is at the last rung of missiles it can ship over (Tomahawks) and this is a card best played as an escalation in reserve. This is because only a small number of Tomahawks will ever be provided (if they are), since the USA actually needs them. Additionally, not even the Ukrainians think they’re actually going to win at this point, they’re trying to raise the cost of Russia’s victory. Better to bluster about cruise missile strikes on St. Petersburg (tragic name change) in order to get Russia to the table then risk the Ukronazis actually hitting something important.

In actual battle news, there are a number of places that have advanced by dozens or hundreds of meters, and you are right about Pokrovsk in terms of media attention. The city was been operationally encircled (all roads in cut or covered by FPVs and artillery) for some time, and it looks like it might finally be squeezed out along with others fronts vaguely in the area. Importantly, Ukraine has lost whatever initiative it had. 2023 saw two mechanized offensives with moderate success, 2024 had the Kursk offensive, and 2025 had Ukraine exclusively playing fireman with reserves and reinforcements

This Western-ish article is from July 2024 and this RT article is from September 2023. There’s probably a qualitative difference between flying over the Black Sea and buzzing Tallinn. That said, Ukraine has carried out a number of strikes on Crimea and naval targets, and these NATO reconnaissance flights almost certainly helped with that

wait, are you saying that “CIA” is in all caps because of emotional invective? a real pedant would have brought up “en masse”, smh. make sure to watch this to the end

i think everything you said is true for nations looking to go to war in the next three to five years. After that, i’d imagine more specialized models and tactics will emerge, and versions made with civilian parts will be worse. More importantly, it would probably be best for countries to start their own drone and drone munition production. It’s about training engineers and technicians as much as it is about making weapons.