Those who call for the end of #NATO amid US threats against #Greenland are wrong.
NATO must still exist, and America, being a hostile power that resorts to military threats against its own allies, must no longer a part of it, and all of its military bases in Europe must be immediately dismantled or repurposed.
Europe must speed up its process towards a federal political union, or be ready to be a bunch of meaningless States split between American, Russian and Chinese influence.
Europe must invest in its own military, technological and economic independence now, and start behaving like the super power that it is rather than a bunch of litigious neighbours. If it means to expel hostile parasites like Hungary in order to work better together, so let it be.
The world is turning into the robber's den where a few strongmen think that they can grab whatever they want, and the robbers want all of their perceived enemies to be divided so that they can be more easily conquered.
Just like they are trying to saw divisions along partisan lines, so we must draw a clear separation along the only partisan line that matters.
Motherfucking imperialist fascists on one side, civilized society on the other.
There's little doubt on which one eventually ends up hung upside down.
The civilized society may disagree on a lot of things, but now it's time for all of us to agree that the only good fascist is a dead one, that no dialogue is possible with them, and that the time to pick up the rifles that our grandparents hung to the wall after WWII is now. Make fascists afraid again.
the Guardian
French president condemns US for ‘turning away from allies’
Emmanuel Macron’s comments come as Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warns against turning world into ‘robber’s den’
In a moment when #democracy and self-determination are attacked from so many sides, and authoritarianism and imperialism are again on the rise, I would expect unity among all those who may disagree on many things, but still agree on some basic axioms of civilization:
- That a democratic framework and the respect of sovereignty and human dignity should not be negotiable.
- That nobody should be subject to prejudice.
- That nobody should aggressively grab someone else's lands or resources, no matter how powerful they are.
- That #fascism is always a cancer to eradicate.
Instead, I am seeing divisions along partisan lines.
"Why Ukraine and not Gaza?"
"Why Gaza and not Ukraine?"
"Why Gaza and not Venezuela?"
"Why Greenland but not Iran?"
And so on, for all the possible combinations of whataboutism.
I would have never thought to write a post to state the obvious and call out partisan whataboutism, but here I am. So before anyone writes another "_but why does Fabio or <put-the-name-of-a-woke-leftist-liberal-here> support X and doesn't say anything about Y_?", read these lines and think twice:
- What #Israel has done and keeps doing in #Gaza is an inexcusable genocide. Its perpetrators must be called accountable, Israel must rebuild what it has destroyed no matter the costs, maximum external pressure through boycotts must be applied to all the productive sectors of Israel's economy, settlers must evacuate all the occupied territories, buffer zones must be set up to prevent any further aggression from either side, and the UN is the only entity legally allowed to control those buffer zones. And all the conditions that have led to such an apartheid State must be dismantled one by one.
- #Hamas is a terrorist group. They must be called accountable for two decades of terror and restrictions imposed to Gazans, they must go and new elections must be held as soon as it's feasible. But they must not go through a permanent military occupation, and not by murdering, displacing and/or starving 2M people. #Palestine has its right to flourish. Without Hamas, and without Israeli colonizers.
- What #Russia has done to #Ukraine is an inexcusable imperialist invasion. It must release all territories invaded since 2014, pay for reconstruction, #Putin must be arrested as soon as he sets his foot in any country that recognizes the authority of the ICJ, maximum pressure through sanctions and boycotts must be applied to everything Russia touches, and buffer zones controlled by the UN must be prepared in order to prevent any further aggression.
- What #Trump is doing to #Venezuela is a grave imperialist attack motivated by nothing else but personal greed and geopolitical games. He must be called accountable for this (and for hundreds of other crimes against his citizens and humanity), all free nations have a civic duty of decoupling themselves from such a rogue actor and isolate #America, and Trump's life must end in a jail.
- What #Maduro has done to #Venezuela and to its people is outrageous. Very few leaders in the past 50 years have been as corrupt, inept and arrogant as him. He literally sits on a mine of easily reachable oil, and yet he couldn't even make a coherent plan to dig it that wasn't rotten in cronyism and corruption from its very start. He has cheated so badly at the latest elections that it was one of the few cases where a simple analysis of the probability of the results could mathematically prove that they were faked. He must go, but not through Uncle Sam suddenly bombing his city, kidnapping him like a thug, jailing him in a country that has no legal jurisdiction over him, and installing whatever puppet could hand him all the oil instead. If you are outraged at Putin for repeatedly trying to install friendly puppets in all former Soviet territories, then you ought to also be outraged at America for repeatedly trying to install friendly puppets in Central and South America.
- What #China threatens to do against #Taiwan is outrageous and the world must firmly condemn it, recognize Taiwan's legitimacy as an independent sovereign country that should develop without the constant threat of Chinese unilateral aggression, and world leaders should provide support to it by explicitly threatening military action against China if it decides to violate Taiwan's sovereignty.
- What Iranian citizens are doing against their decrepit regime is an act of bravery that must be fully supported. The Iranian regime has brought nothing upon its wonderful and smart people but misery, restrictions, bigotry, terror and isolation, and it must go. If its own citizens protest, we must throw our full support at them, until the regime falls. But you don't make the regime fall by simply bombing Teheran. The only thing you achieve by doing that is uniting both the regime and its citizens in their rage against your bombs - which is exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve. Westerners should already have learned in 1979 that any attempts to meddle with the will of #Iran and its people backfires very badly.
- #Greenland is a sovereign territory that is still in the course of building its own autonomy from Denmark. Asking (or even worse threatening) its people to jump from one colonizer to another is as vulgar as publicly asking a woman coming out of an abusive relationship to have sex with you. But of course this is exactly the kind of vulgarity that you'd expect from an unhinged moral pervert like Trump. The world should not give a single fuck about America's security needs, whether real or fictional, when the price for them is colonialist expansion. You can't buy territories at the supermarket. You can't coerce them into selling themselves to you. This is not RisiKo. Self-determination must always be respected. If you're worried about your security, try to behave less like a sociopath jerk and have less enemies. Try to embrace multilateralism and dialogue rather than coercion and authoritarianism. It helps, you'll see.
Let me know if I missed anything from this list.
I hope that the stance is clear and whataboutism is neutralized.
Defending the oppressed and condeming the oppressors is not a partisan political game. It's not a question of being pro or against Israel, America, Russia, Venezuela, China, Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Hamas or whatever. Geopolitical narratives may put the oppressed on opposite sides of partisan lines. International law and the philosophical framework that underpins our civilization since the Enlightenment, instead, put them exactly on the same side.
When you throw whataboutism at someone who is enraged about someone bullied by an imperialist fascist, just because that episode of bullyism isn't something that you're particularly sensitive on, and you want to draw the spotlight on someone else you're more sympathetic with, then you're a filthy imperialist fascist too.
[_Tools for Conviviality_](
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/tools-for-conviviality-2) by Ivan Illich is an essay that anyone who wants to better understand economic and societal trends in tech should probably read.
Written in 1972, it analyzes technological revolutions such as the sewing machine and the car, but it's surprising how the same patterns can also be applied to the era of late-capitalist tech enshittification.
The car is taken as the perfect example of early enshittification cycle.
Its introduction was welcome as a revolution for mobility and personal liberty. It allowed people to travel farther and get more done in a day.
Yet, as its production became standardized and in the hands of a few producers, while its penetration of the market increased, its marginal utility diminished - the industry started to offer fewer benefits and take more in exchange.
What was initially hailed as a _personal freedom_ (you _can_ take the car if your workplace is far, you _can_ take it if you want to go shopping) became an imperative - especially in places like North America. At some point the _can_ became a _must_. The industry started lobbying for more infrastructure to be built to accommodate a new car-centric world where people _must_ use the new technology if they want to go anywhere. And that infrastructure was paid by taxpayers money - including those who didn't use a car, and had to rely on underfunded public transport while subsidizing others' personal luxury. And those who owned a car had to pay subscription costs to the industry in the form of fuel and maintenance (and, nowadays, even actual direct subscription costs).
There's an "industrialization" phase in the development of disruptive technology that flips the purpose of a product on its head - from building tools to serve society, to reshape societies to serve the tool. At that point adoption is no longer optional, and those who don't embrace the product of industrialization face exclusion (the concept of _radical monopoly_).
Most of the technological developments since the textile revolution can be mapped in a precise framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value, and finally an insistence upon the technology's ubiquity.
Illich's solution to the _industrial tool_ (the "_convivial tool_") is remarkably similar to the "small tech" that many of us are building or hosting nowadays.
Convivial tools are defined as sustainable small-scale local-first solutions, designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users.
In 1957 the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than 10 times the average wage.
When the Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, it owned about 22% of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control about 4% of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
From the 1930s (after FDR amended the ultra-liberal excesses that led to the 1929 crisis) right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
In the early 1970s, a comprehensive health insurance used to cost about $35/month per employee, and in most of the States hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be run as non-profits.
Today, health insurance can be as much as 20% of a company’s payroll expense, and the idea of running the health service as a non-profit is by many seen as an abomination that never belonged to America.
When Reagan came into office, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65% of Americans were in the middle class (up from around 20% in the 1930s).
Today, after 44 years of cynical Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43% of Americans are middle class.
No wonder then that:
- A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.
- 51% of likely US Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election (36% don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, and 17% are not sure).
- Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57% want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election.
- Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78% would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election.
And there's another demographic anomaly: as generations grow older they usually turn more conservative.
At some point they end up accumulating enough wealth, and their priority gradually shifts from their right to be given fair opportunities to gain wealth to their right of defending their wealth from any perceived external challenger.
Older Millennials are nowadays well in their 40s, and yet they don't show many signs of turning more conservative like their parents did.
And that's simply because the wealth from the previous generation never had a chance to trickle down to them.
No wonder that nowadays they're more scared of the unhinged excesses of the nefarious Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher economic school than by the idea of a socialist in the White House.
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/democratic-socialism/
