Random Rant Thread

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This is a very good article about Ukraine:

Ukraine's revolution dream stalling due to war in the east and political stasis
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/05/ukraine-revolution-dream-stalling-war-east

The idea that that chocolate oligarch, the Ukrainian Willy Wonka, could somehow address the fundamental problems in the Ukrainian society was laughable to begin with.

Shaun Walker @ The Guardian (and Alec Luhn) has been doing a very good job covering Russia-Ukraine.  They cut through the bullshit from both sides.  Shaun has been accused of being a "fascist apologist for Kiev" AND "Putin spokesman".  That means he's been doing a good job.  If all journalists were like them, I wouldn't have had to be accused of a "Kremlin bootlicker" and all that.  I would be making fun of Ragozin and all the creeps around Putin instead and enjoying it.  I just don't feel like doing that when most of the mainstream media seem to only care about how many different ways they can demonize Putin and Russian people.  They don't seem to care about anything else.

As far as I'm concerned, the Guardian has completely replaced the New York Times as the go-to English-language newspaper.  The British are leading the world once again.

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When someone mentions the right-wing elements of Israeli politics, people tend to imagine a bunch of orc-like old men, like the Israeli version of the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.  Yes, there are old assholes like them, but the real leading right-wing voices, at least for many young Israelis, are people like this:



This Knesset member, Miri Regev, incites racial hatred non-stop, 24/7, and has absolutely no will to give up even an inch of the territory illegally taken away from Palestinians.  But she's far from a "woman with a steel heart" or anything like that.  Someone called her a "whore with a dirty mouth" on FB, and she was so upset that she got him arrested, charging him for "insulting a public official".  It's okay for the mobs to chant "Whore!  Whore!  You like sucking the big Arab dick!  Whore!  You are a whore!" and bully a protester into a corner.  It's okay for them to sing, "Death to the Arabs!  Death to the leftists!", wearing Good Night Left Side T-shirts.  But it's not okay to call her a whore on FB.

Typical, typical right-wing moron.

Or like this:



She's another MK from the Likud party.  Her name is Tzipi Hotovely.  She's only 35 (was the youngest MK ever when she was elected for the first time), but already the deputy Minister of Transportation, which is actually a very good post in Israel, much better than what it sounds like.  Yes, she's telegenic.   She speaks English fluently.  She looks better and hotter than any other MK. 

And she's also a right-wing nutcase, campaigning against the "miscegenation" between Jews and Arabs, unapologetically calling herself a "racist", threatening an Arab MK that her days as an MK were numbered, etc., etc.  Horrible, horrible person, a smarter, more offensive Sarah Palin if you can imagine that.

And ALL of these people are grotesquely neoliberal when it comes to economy and all that.

So, it's typical populism, the right-wing version of it.  They succeeded in making right-wing ideology appear "refreshing" and even "cool".  "That hot, straight-shooting young woman bringing a breath of fresh air into politics", and all that.

I suspect that you wouldn't understand Israeli politics today without understanding this.  Israel is in a way very typical, if you know what's been going on in various parts of the world.

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Let's take a break from all the deaths and miseries.  Here's a lighter topic for you!

Manuel Barroso @ EU eight months ago: "Banks, not taxpayers, will carry the cost for their own mistakes from now on."

Barroso three days ago: "!@g*&$ksdkjhf asdfajl2*&| akjadsDGSdipshitsklfal algskalliarafls *3&Fskf."

All right, I'm pretty economically literate, so I'll decipher that intentional gibberish for you.

Barroso: "We, the EU Commission, approve the taxpayer bailout of Portuguese bank BES, to the tune of €4.4bn."

Is my translation clear enough?

You know, this is not exactly a "lighter" topic.  What the hell was the whole ado about Cyprus all about then?

Chronic liars.


 

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"Why don't you talk about the deaths in Syria (if you are so concerned about the deaths in Gaza)" is really the most offensive kind of concern trolling I've seen in years, and it's everywhere.  The term "concern trolling" was invented exactly for people like them, and they are among the worst of concern trolls.  They make me puke.

"Fuck off" really is the only phrase they deserve to get.

One more thing: those who are saying that Gaza could've been a Singapore (implied: if Palestinians weren't such barbarians), or that it can be a Singapore even after this.  They must fuck off too.  I don't know where to begin, but fortunately, Wikileaks decided to publish lots of classified info (from Snowden files) on Israel-US last week, which makes my job easier here.  For example, shit like this:

Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.

There you have it.  As legit a confirmation as it could get.  Gaza has been subject to the economic "diet" imposed by Israel, another horrible war crime (blockade/embargo/sanctions are forms of warfare).  Singapore, my ass.

I don't know how (willfully or not) blind one has to be to believe, even for a second, that Gaza could've been a Singapore of the Middle East.  They are either atrociously cynical, or dumb as a fucking brick.  It should've been obvious even without the Wikileak cable.

Sometimes I just think...

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Russia banned food imports from the EU, the US, Norway, Canada and Australia, and people are making fun of the "poor Muscovites who won't probably be able to survive without Norwegian fish, Australian lamb, Dutch cheese, Finnish milk, foir gras, French wine, etc... They will starve to death!" and so on.

I'm in no mood to join that idiocy.

This shit is escalating.  You can't control it once it escalated like this.  The problem is that everyone in the midst of this kind of a death spiral thinks they've got it under control for some strange reason.  That stupidity seems to never die, no matter how many times history has demonstrated the folly of the delusion generously to all of us.

No one knows what the fuck they are doing.  This is insanity, and I see no one who can stop it.  Not Angela Merkel, and certainly not Barack Obama.

What?  Vladimir Putin?  Hell no.  I've been saying from Day 1 that he wouldn't back down.  No way.  He doesn't even have anyone on the other side he can talk to.

All the other bit players, including Cameron and Hollande, are absolutely hopeless.  Hell, we've got the world's worst morons - worse than Cameron, worse than Abe, worse than Hollande - namely Tony Abbott and Stephen Harper, representing Australia and Canada respectively, polluting the water tank even further.

The neocons are winning.  This is exactly what they wanted.  I can't believe it.  The people who have been wrong about everything over the past decades, they are winning once again.  We are such hopeless suckers that we probably deserve the consequences.

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So, Iraq.

If the Kurds are really in such a desperate situation, I think I underestimated ISIS's military capabilities.  The Peshmerga, the Kurdish military in Iraq - perhaps the only truly gender-free military force in the world - are no joke.  ISIS can never outgun them, at least in theory, and the geography/topography should favor the Kurds, too.

It's hard to know what's really going on there.  I still can't believe that the Kurds are in such a dire situation as some of the media reports say they are.  I still suspect that they are exaggerating.  I guess I want to believe that they are exaggerating.  But if those reports are true, I might have to support the military intervention in one way or another - at least sending lots of ammos - not to the Iraqi government, but to the Kurds (though I believe the US has been already doing that).  It would be hard, though, since the "US intervention in Iraq" has such horrible stigma thanks to you-know-what.  That just sounds doomed by default.  I know.  I agree.  But at least, this is not Syria.

The hill area between the Sunni Arab region and Kurdish one is a sort of a Maginot line of defense against the Wahhabi zombies.  My assumption was that ISIS would be able to take much land in the Sunni Arab region (where the military intervention would inevitably cause massive "collateral damage", which would turn the people who are otherwise anti-ISIS against the intervening - the familiar story) but not more.  And they wouldn't be able to govern the territory that they took, anyway.  They've got the weapons, they've got the fighters, but they are not a big group, and completely lack that "winning the hearts and minds" ability for an obvious reason.  Their rule wouldn't last long.  Religious fanaticism can only take you so far.  A turf war would ensue soon enough anyway, where they would wear themselves out fighting against other factions, more secular Sunni Arab forces, etc.

But if they successfully invade the Northern area beyond the Sunni Arab region, massacring the Yazidi, Turcoman, the Kurds, that's hard to stomach.  And they WILL massacre those people.  They have already unleashed so much brutality on their fellow Sunni Arabs.  You bet they will go much farther on the largely non-Arab "infidels" like the Northern peoples.  They probably won't even bother to try to "convert" them.  They mean real business, and the Kurds - who are a tolerant bunch who have no ambition beyond securing their own turf in the region - understand it perfectly well.

The Wahhabi types are the worst of all.  Much of Wahhabism is actually Arab chauvinism, under the name of "going back to the true faith of Islam", which imposes ridiculous ancient Arab traditions as "true Islam" on other Muslims.  It was started by, and is financially and materially backed by a bunch of Saudi creeps.  It's the least tolerant and most ambitious branch of Islam today.

This is bad.  What happened to the gazillions of dollars that the US spent on "training and equipping" the official Iraqi military?  What the fuck, neocons?  Weren't you boasting about the "modern Iraqi army" only yesterday? 

It's incredible that they are so weak as to let ISIS be able to fight a two-front war against Baghdad and the Northern peoples like that.  Yes, those ISIS types got the best training from none other than the US, by going through the hell of having to fight a vastly superior foe in the most soul-crushing way possible for years.  They can certainly fight, and fight well.  But they aren't a massive force, far from it.  This is upsetting.

The Iraq invasion by the US and its stupid "allies" really FUBAR'd the entire region so much that I don't even want to think about what led to what and shit like that anymore.

It doesn't look good.  Not good at all.

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Dug Up from History Part II:

South Africa Shouldn't be Singled Out - The Christian Science Monitor*
www.csmonitor.com/1989/1012/ekri.html

See the pattern shared by all the apologists for institutional racism?

If I secretly replaced, say, "blacks in South Africa" with "Palestinian citizens of Israel", "Africa" with "the Middle East", and "blacks" in general with "Arabs", you would think it was written by an Israel apologist yesterday.


* People (mostly non-Americans, perhaps) who are not familiar with the CSM may be alarmed by the words "Christian Science", but it's not some kooky spooky evangelical nonsense publication.  It's an old, respectable news organization, and I read its articles/reports very often too.

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George W. has been at least quiet, probably oil-painting yet another nude selfie as we speak.

I know.  What a way to start a monologue, right?

But seriously.  Tony Blair.  He simply refuses to go home.  The problem is that he's not exactly making the lives of British people miserable; rather, he has been busy exporting the misery to the outside world.  He's a global man, the same way climate change is global.

He's just a walking neoliberal disaster to wreck whatever he touches.  He also gets richer at every step, making his rich friends even richer too in the process.  He seems so satisfied with what he's done for Palestinians/Egyptians/Libyans etc., with his brilliant "missions", while making the situation even worse for those peoples.

And he's probably not even evil.  I wish he were busy sexting and threatening some young girls online, or killing puppies in the basement instead. 

I'm not an expert on the history of British politics, but I would be very very surprised if he wasn't the worst ex-British PM ever.  And I mean, ever.

What a dangerous fucking moron.

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Ah, the memories...

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Wow.



I don't know much about David Norris, but obviously he's no stranger to the Israeli issue.  He's right on pretty much all the points he raised in this emotional speech. Apparently he even had a long-term relationship with Ezra Nawi, an Israeli activist (he's gay).

The Irish, along with South Africans, understand that the issue of Palestine-Israel will never, ever be even semi-solved on that destructive path, as they have lived through the Northern Ireland issue.  They ought to understand that only those who actually have no interest in solving their problem act the way Israel has.

Ireland may be a small, minor country, but they understand something that most other people don't.  They ought to.

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I don't exactly know how, but I was doing some research today, and ended up watching this:



Holy cow.  Not a big wrasslin' fan, but it must take either an incredible amount of talent, an incredible amount of intelligence, an incredible amount of drug or all of the above to keep that up even for half a minute.  One of the finest pieces of performance art I've ever seen.  Totally blows away 99.9% of the contemporary highbrow performance artists out there.  Awesome man.  When he says "Nobody does it better!", I have to believe him.

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OK, I lied. I know exactly how I ended up watching lots of old pro-wrestling clips.

Money in the Bank - The story of pro wrestling in the twentieth century is the story of American capitalism
www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/money-in-the-bank/

Brilliant article about one of the most grotesque examples of labor exploitation that define our right-wing capitalist society.

Always remember: MMA (and kickboxing, for that matter), the rebellious child of pro-wrestling who supposedly has largely overcome pro-wrestling's vices and deficiencies, nonetheless lives in the same sleaze world that its father created, breathing the same air.  And it won't change, unless the society changes.  It's just another extended chapter of the "story of (American) capitalism" indeed.

When you are looking at Dana White, you are looking at Sheldon Adelson.  Jeff Bezos.  The Walton family.  Or at least their spokesman. 

And when you are looking at the UFC fighters, you are looking at yourselves.

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OK, what the US has been doing in Northern Iraq in the last couple of days, that's definitely not what I was suggesting they should do.  I know the US government is not in the business of "nuances" anymore, but what a dumb way to publicize their "humanitarian" interventions.  First of all, don't ever use that word "humanitarian".  It has been raped so hard so many times by idiots that it only malfunctions now.  Stick it up the nostril of Samantha Power and put a cork stopper into it so that it can never get out.

The US government conducts all kinds of stupid "covert operations", most of which actually have nothing to do with the "US security" on practical terms, every week every month in random parts of the world, but when they need them the most, they have to trumpet to the world that they are bombing the shit out of the place.  Genius.

Then you have the usual suspects, like that piece of shit John McCain, bullshitting again about the "threat to the US national security" and all that crap.  ISIS being a "threat to America"?  It's a "threat" to the oil company operating in the Kurdish area maybe, but that's about all you could say.  When I'm worried about ISIS, I don't give a fuck about "America".  I only care about the Kurds and others in the area.  "The US national security" can just fuck off and go back to watch WrestleMania.

Their desperate search for Big Bad Enemies is just pathological.  One day it's Osama bin Laden, and next day it's Vladimir Putin.  One day it's Hugo Chavez, and another day it's Saddam Hussein.  And now it's ISIS, supposedly a Wehrmacht and Japanese Imperial Navy combined.  Which it isn't by any wild stretch of imagination, like Al-Qaeda never was either.  Even Russia is far, far, far from it.  And if you remember that ISIS was born exactly out of the wreckage of Iraq War, a direct result of John McCain's brilliant policy (aka pathology/madness), you get the extra sense of horror.

And here's what Hillary Clinton had to say about Syria, in her interview by Jeffrey Goldberg, a former Israeli prison guard who made it in the American journalism as a neoliberal-neoconservative "liberal" blowhard:

I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protest against Assad, there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle, the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadis have now filled.

There you have it.  If you think Obama is bad, watch out.  The most-likely next President of the US of A is a neocon-tard monster who just can't get over or simply ignores the fact that America can't just "fix" stuff in other parts of the world with might.  At least, Iraq War totally blew all the possibilities of the US playing a major productive role in that part of the world any time soon, and its total inaction in Gaza reminded the ordinary people living there of the US's utter ridiculousness once again.  Madness is to repeat the same action and expect different results, and that's what the US government willfully suffers from.

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Many people seem to believe that Hillary is putting this gruesome neocon splatter fest on just to please her neocon-Zionist financial supporters.  Even I may have given you such an impression in a previous post, but judging from what kind of people she interacts with these days, I'm pretty sure that she actually believes all the bullshit she says about Israel, Syria, Iraq, Russia etc. now.  She's too proud of her intelligence (which isn't much in my opinion) to knowingly bullshit all the time.  Very few people are mentally strong enough to do that, and she isn't one of them, despite that stereotypical image of her as a tough woman who can outwit all men.  She was so miserably outwitted by Obama last time, after all.  The way she lost to Obama turned my suspicion that she was actually a fairly dumb person into a firm conviction.

Frightening woman nonetheless.  Worse than George W. on foreign policies given the circumstances (and possibly even on economic issues), and NO, this is not just hyperbole.  But I guess it's okay because she supports gay rights, gender equality and possibly the legalization of marijuana.  She doesn't give a fuck about income inequality and labor exploitation, though. That's what American liberalism has been reduced to - a joke is what it is.  As a leftist (perhaps of a somewhat peculiar kind...), I find almost nothing in common with those "liberals" anymore; they are what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "Moderate" - the greatest obstacle in our struggle.  They should rename themselves as Blairists or something.

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Mainstream media finally started reporting what has been quite obvious all along.

As Ukraine’s armed forces tighten the noose around pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the western-backed government in Kiev is throwing militia groups – some openly neo-Nazi - into the front of the battle.

The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites.

“Personally, I’m a Nazi,” said “Phantom”, a 23-year-old former lawyer at the ceremony wearing camouflage and holding a Kalashnikov.

Phantom said he was such a Russian but that he was opposed to Moscow supporting “terrorists” in his homeland: “I volunteered and all I demanded was a gun and the possibility to defend my country.”

Asked about his Nazi sympathies, he said: “After the First World World War, Germany was a total mess and Hitler rebuilt it: he built houses and roads, put in telephone lines, and created jobs. I respect that.” Homosexuality is a mental illness and the scale of the Holocaust “is a big question”, he added.

Ukraine’s government is unrepentant about using the neo-Nazis. “The most important thing is their spirit and their desire to make Ukraine free and independent,” said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Arsen Avakov, the interior minister. “A person who takes a weapon in his hands and goes to defend his motherland is a hero. And his political views are his own affair.”

Yup, it's exactly these fascists, with the official stamp of Kiev's approval, who have been fighting on the front around Luhansk, Donetsk, etc., shelling residential areas with Grads to terrorize the people.  Donetsk, once a vibrant industrial city of one million population, is a ghost city now, and so many people in Eastern Ukraine have either fled to Russia or live in shelters - scared, starved, half-dehydrated, using buckets as toilets.

But Samantha Power said it was all Putin's fault, so let's get the bastard and it will all be fine, right?  The people in those areas will welcome Kiev with open arms after all this, right?

Give me a fucking break.