Aug 20, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

British journalist Richard Medhurst reports that on Thursday he was arrested and treated as a terrorism suspect for the expression of political opinion under Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act.

As Consortium News explains, under this law one can be prosecuted if the accused “invites support for a proscribed organisation” or “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation,” meaning any group the British government says are terrorists.

Every part of this is a horrifying assault on press freedoms and freedom of expression.

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Axios headline: “Hamas rejects new U.S. proposal for Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal”.

Seven paragraphs down: “specifically, Hamas objects to the fact that the proposal doesn’t include a permanent ceasefire”.

So Hamas “rejected” a “ceasefire” because it wasn’t a ceasefire — at least not in any way that matters to people who want the killing to end.

For months on end Israel and its western spinmeisters have been exploiting the fact that “ceasefire” can mean a temporary pause in the genocide in a way that allows them to keep framing Hamas as rejecting a peace deal, when really they just want a permanent end to the killing.

No normal human being is asking for a temporary pause in Israel’s genocide; that is literally never, ever what anyone means when they call for a ceasefire. But these pedantic word games are being used to obfuscate the reality that Israel and its western backers want the genocide to continue.

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It’s maddening how the Biden administration has spent ten months going “Well golly gosh we’re doing everything we can to stop the fighting in Gaza, gee willikers diplomacy is hard!” WHILE SINGLE-HANDEDLY MAKING THIS GENOCIDE POSSIBLE. Literally all they’d have to do is stop supplying it.

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Israel is a murderous, tyrannical, psychopathic regime. So is the western empire. So when westerners talk about having “shared values” with Israel, they’re not actually lying.

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Israel has spent ten months proving its biggest critics 100 percent correct about it and proving that everything Israel’s supporters have said to disparage those critics was a 100 percent bogus smear campaign. And yet they’ll STILL try to call you an antisemite for criticizing Israel.

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Nothing I say here should ever be taken as a suggestion that you should vote any particular way or not vote at all. That is never, ever what I’m doing here. What I’m doing is using the US election to highlight the contradictions and abuses of the empire and the futility of using electoral politics to address them.

Vote or don’t vote in whatever way you want. No matter who you vote for, you’ll get tyranny, war and genocide.

Vote for Harris and you’ll get tyranny, war and genocide.

Vote for Trump and you’ll get tyranny, war and genocide.

Vote for Kennedy and you’ll get tyranny, war and genocide.

Don’t want tyranny, war and genocide? Go ahead and try to elect someone like Jill Stein or Cornel West who stands against tyranny, war and genocide. But have no doubt that the system is rigged to prevent that from succeeding, and you’ll get a president who stands with tyranny, war and genocide.

Tyranny, war and genocide is all you get to elect, so vote however you want in your fake performative election. Is the guy with the boot on his head running this year? Vote for him if you want. I don’t care.

There are no answers in electoral politics. That doesn’t mean there are no answers, it just means you don’t live in a free society where power is held to account by the electorate. There are ways of addressing this which don’t involve voting, but those will never become an option as long as people are relying on the fake plastic keys they’ve been handed to try and escape from their prison.

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The US is the single most tyrannical regime on the planet and retains its power by creating a mind-controlled dystopia where the public is brainwashed with propaganda, and its politicians fearmonger about the nation falling to “communism” or “fascism” if you cast the wrong vote.

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Presidential election season always makes Americans a bit more crazy than usual. All the emotional investment they’re fed by the mainstream press and their social media echo chambers about this phony spectacle goes to their head and practically leaps off the screen when I interact with them online.

I’m not really caught up in that stuff so I just keep talking about the empire however it’s showing up in the narrative matrix from day to day, but my replies are always laden with so much more white hot vitriol in those few months before November every four years — often from people who’d otherwise be on my side of things.

It’s always a bit surprising and jarring.

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