So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
I recall this time as a very strong refusal of the above miscategorization of NATO. Bush and his cronies had a whole “you’re with us or against us” tantrum when NATO didn’t follow. I think Americans even did some proto-Trump trolling with “freedom fries” and other nonsense.
As for Iraq: UK, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark provided soldiers to partake in the illegal invasion. Even Iceland participated in the propaganda war by putting them self on the farcical “Coalition the willing” along plenty of other NATO countries.
It is very hard to see NATO as anything other then an extension of USA‘s imperial ambitions. It is as if in the year 1986 you would look at the Warsaw pact and claim this is a pact of independent nations and has nothing to do with the interest of the Soviet Union.
My last attempt to convince you: Ask your self, why did Iceland not vote in favor of a ban on nuclear weapons at the UN general assembly 2016? Why has Iceland still not signed and ratified the treaty? Why has no NATO member done so? Why are Austria and Ireland one of very few European nations to do so?
Aside from France and the UK, it is hard to find an answer here which does not include American imperialist agenda.
Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.
When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I also think that history has been far too kind to France’s supposed opposition to the illegal invasion. France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights. If France and Germany were serious about their supposed opposition to that war they would have at least threatened to withdraw. But such actions were never even considered. France and Germany were perfectly happy to allow American Imperialist agenda to materialize, even though most other NATO countries took a more active role in the crimes.
No, I'm saying that states are relatively free to agree or disagree with the US, at least until president 47. France faced no consequences, and countries like Nicaragua are on the opposite end of the geopolitcal spectrum with no particular interest in a war on the other side of the world.
Because whether Iraq or Afghanistan bear the historical hallmarks of imperialism is up to debate, especially with Afghanistan with clear casus belli, stated war objectives, and no intention to annex or directly control/govern the territory. The actual number of countries supporting either is a good metric on that; I think Afghanistan war had a much wider support for a reason. Putting both conflicts together is simplistic, if not disingenuous.
>France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights.
The USSR stood inside an economic and arguably military alliance with literal Hitler until 41. The USSR fed the Wehrmacht, fueled their tanks, and provided metals for their war machine. Mentioning this since you already mentioned you're on the left side of the spectrum. Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?
Breaking an alliance simply because an ally does something you don't agree with, while morally commendable, it is also simplistic. France didn't pull out, like nobody pulled out when France was committing atrocities in Algeria, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus; no Warsaw Pact countries left during Hungary 56, Albania did leave because of Prague 68 but only because of it being the last straw on their already strained relations, like CSTO countries aren't pulling out because of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. Armenia is trying to pull out only because the CSTO wasn't there when it was needed, that is, when the treaty doesn't address its very own points.
Alliances are born out of self-interest, not out of moral purity or consistency.
Yes we can, we should, and we do. People on the left (aside from actual Stalinist) do admit that this alliance was bad, kind of like how liberals admit how the British government was wrong to pursue the strategy of appeasement.
What makes this different though is that both Stalin and the British government (under new leadership albeit) reversed course and fought and defeated fascism. We have not seen France nor Germany do this. To the contrary.
> Alliances are born out of self-interest.
This is the world we live in, but we don‘t have to accept it, and we can and should pressure our leaders into making the moral choice. Perhaps a better world is possible, and perhaps blaming our leaders for moral failures is our way to a better world.
Smoke screen.
The USA launches its attacks from the territories of NATO members.
NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.
NATO countries, yes (mostly the Brits and Polish). NATO as an organization, only for Serbia and Afghanistan.
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-italy-us-bas...
NATO Chief, Rutte: "Europe is a platform of power projection for the United States."
Of course, the local political cover story in Italy is that these bases are 'only used for logistics, never direct attacks', but that's just a cover story to deflect any retribution Italy may receive from Iran and its allies, for Italy's participation in the US' heinous acts, and to keep the internal messaging politically correct within Italys' current circus ...
https://en.lasicilia.it/news/italy-world/3052391/the-us-iran...
This is just posturing to avoid retribution. Everyone in Europe knows that NATO bases have been used almost every day since April 2003 by the US to commit its crimes.
Lets also admit that NATO-aligned bases in Poland and Germany are also essential to the US' crimes.
See also, Camp Darby near Pisa, actively supporting NATO and U.S. European and African Command operations.
Remove any qualifier and you end up in some other category.
Furthermore, the noblogs.org platform (previously hosted by A/I) is used to host a lot of politically-motivated content, including news and statements by various resistance groups across the world, which of course is considered terrorist by the USA, but legally should fall under freedom of the press.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
FTFY
The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
At that rate, how many can even be left by now?
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
Police and security trying to manage a dynamic situation with minimum loss of life by not immediately gunning down quasi-violent crowd is a more reasonable conclusion.
Regardless, 100% of which is Trump's fault for incitement.
if that happened to me at work it would be something I talked about all the time, there are a thousand ways it could have gotten even worse
The whole plan after the judicial effort failed (using the courts to overturn the vote outcome) and the individual shakedowns failed (calling up governors and demanding they change the vote outcome) was to pressure senators to throw out the state certificates, kick them back to the states, and have the states decide that Trump won instead. They had a whole slate of fraudulent shadow certificates with Trump as the winner ready for Senators to certify. That 10000% would have worked because there are more red states than blue, so they would have just picked Trump over Biden.
But Pence refused to go along with the plan. So the mob was the last ditch effort to convince the senators. Its purpose was not to kill the senators but to delay the vote to give more time to affect the influence campaign. So that plan was also very very close to working because they did delay the vote. It only didn't work because Mitch McConnell refused to end the session and kept everyone around to complete the certification of the vote on January 7. But the fact that it happened on January 7 means that the plan very nearly worked.
You need to look at J6 as a buffer overflow attack. There are no instructions for what to do if the J6 vote is disrupted by a mob, the hope was that but putting the country in that illegal state would allow for arbitrary instructions to be executed.
[1] https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/absolute-hero-capitol-...
You can be the judge as to whether it succeeded or victory was deferred, but violence definitely won in the end.
The fight is to never get to this situation again and to keep the rights people died for you to have.
You act like things are binary “comfort” vs “horrible life”. It’s not like Fascism grows slowly and then suddenly you are locked.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
It takes 3.5% of the population to effect change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
I think this was an inevitable outcome of western culture's individualism being inherently selfish.
This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.
It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.
Geronimo.
Or sue, or organize and protest, or win the next election. Not every government problem warrants revolution, and not needing to revolt is not a failing of the people.
> Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution
A better read is that the situation for most Americans and "Westerners" whatever that means, is that things are good enough that the people do not see value in revolution, or they are able to adjust the government's course enough through elections, redress, courts and other political feedback mechanisms.
Or maybe people realize that revolutions, and the civil war that almost always ensue, are a very high price to pay, for a very uncertain reward.
Talking about the Arab spring, look what it lead to:
- Egypt and Tunisia are again being lead by a dictator, it's just a younger one.
- Libya is destroyed, lacks leadership and conflict could resume any day should Haftar decide he doesn't like the result of the upcoming (but long postponed) elections.
- Syria has suffered the worst civil war of the decade and the situation is still very brittle. It looks like Jolani could bring redemption to Syria, but with the Israeli playing around with fire it could also collapse any day. And that's assuming Jolani doesn't turn into a dictator himself: we're not talking about someone with a good track record of honoring his promises (which is a good thing when the promise is made to ISIS or Al Qaeda, but still).
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their billionaires stole from us.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (and on some issues they can be close to equally as bad).
Most should take those odds over giving up another inch of freedom.
We really need laws removing the power from the President to unilaterally declare organizations terrorists. At least not long term without their ability to fight the designation in court.
(Same for tariffs. There is no case where one needs emergency power to tariff or sanction anything. If you need to conduct urgent police action, court-ordered asset freezes are plenty.)
We’re in a globalized world with aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The fallacy of thinking a major economy (or significant nation) can decouple from any expansionist regime is a lesson I thought we learned from the first half of the last century.
At invading or achieving any geopolitical objective, yes (though I wouldn’t compare the American military-industrial base to Russia’s). At causing at least as much chaos as sanctions, no.
The Russian weapons (at various points) were missing critical components, maintenance, fuel, etc.
The US weapons appear to have functioned as specified, but the commander-in-chief appears to know marginally less about the Iranian strategic situation than I personally do. And this is not a boast, I have zero military training and only follow the occasional commentator like Anders Puck Nielsen and read the odd Wikipedia page when something surprising comes up in the news or a comment, and pay enough attention to the news and comments to be capable of surprise, it's just that I asked someone around 20 years ago if the War On Terror would go to Iran given all the obvious threads leading there, and they told me it would go down basically as we saw it going down this year: very expensive, no real progress, strategic failure no matter what military victories happen.
Only then will you have the moral altitude you profess to have with the rest of the world, and not until then.
"Terrorist" is just this centurys' n-word - a phrase which racists cannot overtly use any more so they invented a new term to supplant it.
American here. This is a non-starter. Nobody does it. And war is a domain where leading on moral authority requires firepower to back it.
We don’t agree on what does and doesn’t constitute a war crime, the term seems to cover almost all war as well as actions taken by every global and regional power in almost every military action they’ve each taken.
We need reform. But pretending we can legally ban war is silly.
The USA is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism and its #1 fighter of illegal, criminal wars. Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible, we are all going down the drain with the USA and its war criminals.
You can’t do this when nobody else does, and particularly not when pretty much every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists. In practice, all war appears to be illegal under international law. That makes the law untenable, which may be part of why it’s being ignored.
> Until the American people start demanding justice for the crimes for which their state is responsible
I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law. But someone needs to propose something realistic.
If you're going to dance around pretending to be the only world power, you have to set the example you want to see of the other 'lesser nations' which are subject to your war criminals' purposes.
>every act of war in the world is alleged to be a war crime by activists.
So what you're really saying is that warriors should always be senior to activists.
This problem runs deep.
>I agree that we need a framework limiting the U.S. military under U.S. law.
No, I'm saying that the U.S. needs to stop being a criminal nation beholden only unto itself.
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
No one is claiming that Amy Klobuchar or Gavin Newsom is a member of antifa.
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
>With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States.[4][22] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic.[23] Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.[4]
I was responding to the comment that said "Everyone who disagrees with the GOP is labeled antifa" with two of the many prominent Democrat politicians who haven't been. Should I have listed 50 of them or 100?
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo
Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design, but that doesn't make it fictional.
They are obviously a terrorist organization and it is good to go after their financing and communication channels.
If a movement has no leaders at all then it's not an organization.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
If people could imagine it being used against them, maybe they might understand. Like labeling the Republican party a terrorist organization because they sponsored Jan 6 insurrectionists.
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
I mean, there's not really room for debate on it. Voting to take your money away from you and give it to people who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime is obviously against your interests. But that's what Republican policy does. That's why they have to make increasingly outlandish fictions and fund whole media empires to sell those fictions: to convince people to keep voting against themselves. Between either a billionaire, or the guy down the street making burritos for $8 an hour, it's obvious which one took all of your money. It's the guy with the money. The increasingly elaborate alternate reality exists to hide this from their voters, so they can keep raiding us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.