Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner, who works for Center on Conscience & War, explains the unprecedented number of conscientious objector (CO) applications the organization has received in the first 24 days of the illegal and immoral war against Iran, and the general sentiment among applicants. He also notes that:
"Most people in the military don't know about our organization. ... Most people in the military don't even understand CO and that CO is an actual option that they have. It's DoD policy. It's military regulation. If you have a firm belief that those beliefs are violated by you participating in war, then you're entitled to an honorable discharge after a process that the military is obligated to follow and respect your beliefs throughout that process. So, it's a powerful tool that's available to service members, but most don't even know what it is and that it's an option that exists. They think it has to be religious or pacifist or things like that. Those things are not true. And so the number of people that have called us and wanted to start applications represents a very small sample size. And for every one of those people that has called us, I always ask them, are there other people in your unit that agree with you? They always say yes. They say that there's other people who want to file a CO but are too scared and intimidated. And there's even more people than that who agree that the war is wrong, wish they didn't have to take part in it, but don't see any other option and feel like they just have to go along with it."
"And again, all this surge came even before we were talking about a ground war and invading. The people that are calling us and saying that they don't want to take part in this, they're not people that think they are going to die. They're not people who are thinking I got to get out of this because I'm not willing to die in this war I don't agree with. These are people who do not want to hurt people in Iran for a war they do not agree with."
It's most likely the usual case of until they see more fellow military people making the move, the rest aren't willing to be the nail that stands out for the hammer to make an example of. And then they wonder why people with their heads in the right place call them sheep.
It ain't just military men. Once you start down that road, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
Unfortunately that really is how the majority see it. People who are truth tellers whistle blowers or ( pardon the thought) Honest politicians are immediately persecuted and run off, by the very criminal justice system that won't prosecute the super rich super criminals.
I'm one of those awkward people who has principles and refuses to sell out, so going along to get along doesn't appeal at all to me, in fact they are the kind of people I see in my neighborhood that sicken me more than most. I'm no good with compromise either, yes while working I paid taxes but I hardly call that compromise, just me preferring to retain my freedom to fight against those in power to the best of my abilities.Like I said on here once before, I'd sooner people say they were on the opposite side of right, that way I have something to argue against occasionally getting someone over to the right side.
Covid helped someways to sort the wheat out from the chaff, unfortunately so many got the jab it proved exactly what we were up against
The Lab I work at now has a new policy, they would randomly search visitors accessing the public spaces, I didn't even know they did that. Now I was sent an email saying they will search all vehicles coming and going, public or users. After the upgrades to the entrances the place looks like a military base or prison. WTF.
That's awful, so now everyone has become a person to be suspicious of.
Of course they'll word it that it's for the good of everyone but we know that's not what it's all about. It's just another form of control, as in, keeping the little man/woman in their place. Be grateful we care so much about you all.
There probably would be more if so many weren't worried about facing a lifelong blacklist. The way this pseudo democracy works I'm sure that one way or another there will be reprisals.
That's exactly why I ignore people who say the Natives were savages who attacked the immigrants in their "new world", there were a lot of quaker farmers who lived often miles from their nearest neighbours and yet, although the Natives were where they lived, they were never attacked once for the simple reason the Quakers didn't attack them first.
My family was forced to leave from the Tower of London ( A big mouth preacher) or a life sentence for speaking out against the Church of England. So in 1631 John sailed to the New World which really was an old world. We started in Mass. then down the Ohio river valley to the Mississippi river, the gold rush sent them raping and pillaging to Ca. up to Oregon where we have a glacier named for the family. The glacier has melted to the point a team will search to see if it can be saved and marked. The Indigenous should have killed them as them came to shore. What would the world be like if the Indigenous had never allowed the Murderous Monsters stepping foot in paradise. The book about my family is laughable.
Sadly they helped the Pilgrim Fathers that set foot on a land where they lived, that's where the real meaning of your Thanksgiving Day came from. After helping those who would have starved and died of cold that first long winter, the Natives taught them how to make shelters, how to hunt using bow and arrows and shared their food supplies with them. The following year the pilgrims laid on a feast for Natives and themselves and called it a Thanksgiving meal of joint feasting and laughing together. A shame the USA does not remember that.
The main thing about your family's history is that it produced good men like yourself, your family's history may be yours in one way but it does not define who you are, never forget that my friend. 💖
Mother's,father's, sisters, brothers, friends, family, acquaintance spread the word. Don't let you babies grow up to be soldiers or cops or any type of employee to government. Boycott works
Can we agree on Social Workers rather than armed murderous thugs? I would offer crime would disappear if the u.s. created a force like most countries have, solve the problem don't hide it in jails and prisons?
My experience of my white middle class country men and women is that they're largely rude self-absorbed consumption-directed shitheads, with certain exceptions in my fleshly and online lives. So it's no wonder that these folks are susceptible to any bullshit media wants to feed them.
I don't disagree with you at all but would expand your group to include people of color, people of working and welfare classes as well because we are all being targeted with these bullshit artists agenda, just different angles to get their desired outcome.
Yes, indeed. I just happened to have the rare displeasure today of hobbling out with my cane among that particular crowd, and the experience was less than thrilling.
I just had this delightful image of you finally having had enough, hanging onto something solid and whirling your cane about at head height amongst the crowd. 😁
At one point, when a small woman with a giant overflowing cart rolled it into my path nearly knocking me over as though I were a product display—then looked away as if nothing at all transpired—I assure you that I was tempted to wield the cane as a defensive weapon.
😂 It's the way they look at you, as if it was your fault, nothing to do with the fact they weren't paying attention to their surroundings. I bet those pointy cowboy boots would have come in handy.
It's still not because they are white. Where I am, the behavior is split along lines of origin, with NW Europeans mostly not being overtly crude and rude and most everyone else is, in varying belligerent ways.
The government thrives on division,chaos, and hatreds, as well as secrecy and lies, violence, threats and coercion. Without willing enforcers bought with stolen loot they are nothing.
But you do also wonder, what you yourself have been "susceptible to" and what bullshit you have "digested" yourself. I mean you're right, my God, the stupidity of people - how many just throw away their lives by obediently going to a war for some obese billionaire golfer.
But I also think about all the stupid shit I've done in my life, and how my take on certain things was (sometimes) far from reality based. So how do you sail your own solitary boat through these waters? Which way do you go? Does any particular direction matter? How do you know?
the stupidest thing most people have done in their lives, is allowing an evil ruling class to rule over them. most 'bad' things we can do pale in comparison to the structural evil our rulers do every day without even have to feel guilty about.
study marxist analysis in a communist org. this is the right thing to do because it is the one thing they don't want you to do.
The problem is the constant narrative that convinces people that they are under attack, that the bad guys want what they have, that the bad guys are already here in ‘sleeper cells, that the bad guys will be landing on the shores of California if we don’t bomb Hanoi, Cambodia, Grenada, Baghdad, …or Teheran.
I didn't buy it when it was Vietnam, nor Iraq, and I don't buy it now. It's sickening and shocking the amount of other people's money and precious lives (both American and
foreign) that these chickenhawks so casually throw away. And the orange satan is no doubt making billions on this evil. "To the barricades!"
I didn't buy it either, but I also know it doesn't explain or fix anything to demand others to be in the same place, with the same understanding, that I have, at the same moment. And there was a time, at whatever young age it might have been, when each of us were unaware.
They are coming from places that are incomprehensible to me. I spent a lot of years writing them all off as idiots, but, today, millions of them have managed to come around, maybe some only yesterday, so I have learned the hard way, that if it's possible, it won't be in my preferred way, nor to my preferred schedule.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken
And the most imaginary of all? That government is always your enemy and can do no good at all. The billionaire psychopathic assholes love that particular hobgoblin of untruth.
When we look at the full impact of what government is and does it is very apparent that their own actions have created the issues that they then propose to fix with additional legislation which almost always results in loss of freedom and more harm to one group to pacify another..Minimum wage laws, environmental protections, hate crime legislation . Name it,examine it closely from both sides . Government is NOT your friend. Read some Harold L. Mencken quotes from 100 years ago. Also every argument by the so called Antifederalists presented against the ratification of the Constitution have in 250 years proved to be absolutely TRUE ABUSES we suffer today.
There are times when the threats, and preemptive activities of individuals require immediate action to prevent Dangerous escalation. In essence they have actually started it by their activities and or words.
I don't know that there's any way we can ever fully know, especially in terms of dissecting what exact patterns of BS we fell susceptible to over time. Memory always becomes corrupted in some fashion, even if such an analysis is attempted. So people pay shrinks. Does it help? Sometimes.
After a certain point life becomes a continuous debacle of looking back at the things you did only five years ago and saying “what on earth was I thinking?”
I think (I’m hoping) that one eventually just becomes inured to it, like, there is no hindsight, no restarts or do-overs. You can’t ever be sure of the information you’re acting on or the outcome of events in progress, so you’ve just got to steam ahead doing the best you can.
Jamenta, since I was a young person I was asking myself how do you "swim across the ocean" (metaphor for live your life) full of SHIT/FECES and come clean on the other side. Practically impossible in this sick depraved self-destructive human world.
Question everything. Don't be afraid to change your mind about something when you receive new information. Never stop learning,, And as Mark Twain said" Travel is fatal, to bigotry prejudice and narrow mindedness. " Never let your teenage self direct your adult life.
My Grandfather temped me with paying for needs IF I would go to the Air Force Academy during the Vietnam war. Thankfully I am color blind or an education may have temped me even knowing what it was for. Could it be he thought it was an easy way to cut my hair : ) Writing this, an imagine of him and his fucking u.s. flag on a 20' pole in front of his house came to mind. He was such an asshole. When he died my Grandmother finally experienced love meeting a school friend. They loved each other until he died. She was so happy. On visiting we would stay up late and talk about all the things that would not be approved in her earlier life ha. Sorry, about the ramble but writing it was a treat for me. I loved her after getting to know her in her new life.
It's interesting when you get up there in age like I am now - that you really do realize how short life is. And you do wonder more than ever about the deeper Existential questions of your existence. Is life just one accident after another? Is reality some mechanical accident and our life just a mole on the buttcheek of the Universe? A mole that barely exists for an hour?
I like happy endings so nice to hear your Grandmother found some happiness near the end of her life. Love is pretty important in life. Without it, it really does become a slog.
I think it depends where you live Vin. I take my business to the local bluecollar small towns and we all smile and say Hi to each other. And allow people with fewer items to go ahead of us in the checkout line!
When I visited my nephew in Denver a couple years ago, people passing you wouldn’t even look you in the eye.
I laughed knowing I could easily be included in that group ha. I do at times tend to be self absorbed, however I am cheap so consumption nah. hahahha Thank you for that. I wonder if Genocide-Demented Don will stop when he has shit up every country in the world or will he start the process over? Wait is that what the concentration camps are for?
Its a ploy as old as time itself. All you have to do to convince a population to go along with war is to convince them that they are under attack while branding the opposition as unpatriotic. We saw this clearly during the run-up to the Iraq War. The US Mass Media dutifully repeated Bush's lies that Saddam possessed WMD's even though the UN's chief WMD inspector said exactly the opposite. Many of us knew Bush was lying and Colin Powell's biggest regret was pushing those lies on the floor of the UN.
And that is why nobody outside of the MAGA bubble trusts a word that Trump says. He says the US was about to be "imminently" struck by Iran without a single shred of evidence. Netenyahu says they are weeks away from a nuclear weapon without a single shred of evidence. And those two MOTHERFUCKERS are burning the world down and causing a new Dark Age because of their lust for war. And the world is paying dearly for the folly of these two corrupt, old men.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Colin Powell and regret should never be used in the same sentence. Colin Powell was despicable. Typical apparatchik who made career by kissing upward. Power attracts such kind of people - cheaters, liars, unethical power-hungry narcissists.
Well done for publishing and saying - Peace be upon you by Gaza and Jerusalem - Honour and victory are the allies of the axis of resistance and its allies, and humiliation and shame are for the axis of evil, Epstein Class (USA, Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, NATO Governments, Zionist and Israel) and its allies.
NATO should be disbanded. It was created at the end of WWII to control Europe for the future. The U.S. forces never left. They still occupy every NATO country.
Yes, Carolyn, NATO should have been disbanded long ago. When the Soviet Union "disintegrated", Gorbachev was promised by the then President of the USA that if the USSR disbands the Warsaw Pact, NATO too would be disbanded. Gorbachev (clueless about the lying, cheating, conniving western political class) believed Reagan's word - and believing the Cold War was over agreed. Only to be confronted with an expanded NATO which gobbled up the Warsaw Pact countries.
The provoked war between Russia and Ukraine-US-NATO is a direct result of what happened then.
When i was young i was repelled by the spectacle of a puffed up Trump humiliating some cretin on his dismal show that was grovelling for the asinine masters approval by demonstrating his conquerors qualities. I thought then that that bastard was so obviously a disgusting evil swine like the arrogant white racists of my country that he would soon be expelled like a malignant tick from a healthy organism. I read a great book by a german philosopher who used for his argument the contrast between the ego formations of Trump and Einstein, with the latters humility and realism showing by sharp contrast the ridiculous shortcomings of the current occupant of the us white house for the second time, for pitys sake. Whatever the hell as a class phenomenon that orange exemplar of profound buddist ignorance is, it is not an argument for a positive prognosis of human development in any form, but perhaps, and collectively intentionally, as suggested by the Epstein crime syndicate, the opposite. Trump is insolently foregrounded to cement as solidly as possible the dictatorship of the opulent minority of disreputable humanoids who create the gods from expensive stolen materials in their own shabby and rotting image. That the US has permitted this man two twice occupy the highest office of their nation turning it into a gang of kindergarten bullies does not reflect well on the average psyche of the country. The American state itself seems to be a proud refuge for the worst psychopathic scum that Ayn Rand can produce, and it remains a constant surprise to me that civil war has not erupted openly in its streets, or real retaliatory attacks from raped and oppressed regions have not been more prevalent, a situation that would certainly have arisen long ago if Trump was actually the dominant model for what is valuable in a human being, and not just a sick experiment gone wrong.
Why are some people born smarter than others? Why do some people lead lives of mostly poverty and back breaking struggle, and others, born with a silver spoon feeding them?
in hindsight, the holocaust looks like the beginning of the mental sickness that has taken over Israel and much of the world. Now, instead of Nazis, the murderers are Zionists. Battered children sometimes, tho not always, grow up to be battering parents. Not all Germans were or are Nazis. The Zionists have worked hard to change that by ensuring that Jewish children, continueing on into adulthood, are brainwashed to believe that they are supreme beings with the right to take whatever they want, kill whomever they please, and demand that the rest of the world support them or risk being called antisemites. Not all Jews are Zionists but all Jews are less safe with Zionism being taught to others.
You would think, after all the documentaries on the Holocaust, after some very well known films - such as "Schindler's List", and after the UN was founded, and International Laws were codified after World War II, to avoid another holocaust - after all this, including a US Constitution that is suppose to be above all tyrants or abuses of power in the US - you would think another Holocaust could have been avoidable.
And yet here we are. Some of us not for much longer (given our age). But it is astonishing that despite all the documentation we grew up with, the "Never Again" slogan many of us heard frequently in our childhood - that Never Again - has turned into, "Let's Do It Again".
jamenta, It is a real conundrum, isn't it... but all those films, documentaries, international laws had one main flaw running through them. It was formulated by the 'victors'. And from their viewpoint. The Hollywood movies brain-washed the masses. At the end of every film the hero stands in glory with his smoking gun with dead bodies all around him. Everything was settled by the gun.
Vladimir Mayakovsky - the Russian playwright, poet, artist, actor and intellectual and Communist, has famously said " Capitalism threw gold in the eyes of cinema and made it blind".
Not only cinema, but international laws and UN bodies are flawed. Only "third world"despots ever get called out and charged for crimes against humanity, when most US Presidents fit the bill.
We were given to understand that the US Constitution is perfect. But it was written by white men of property for white men of property. When we look around at the oligarchs today - even with all the amendments - nothing seems to have changed.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was always at the expense of someone else.
My dad always used to look a interwar Germany and ask, but there were so many good, decent people, how could they allow something so evil to be built around them?
He’s carried on voting for Labour all along; now the Labour Home Secretary is talking gushingly about her intention to turn Britain into a “panopticon” (literally that word); they have arrested thousands of people as terrorists for protesting against government policy and arrested journalists for writing books critical of them; they have abolished the right to trial by jury; and they are complicit in genocide. He is exactly modelling the Weimar Republic liberals.
Yes, but when our team does it, then that makes it okay!
Ask your pap whether he is good with the Tories, or (gasp!) Reform running the Panopticon. Because sooner or later, the goodthink PMC types at Labour will no longer be in charge.
Off the top of my head I can’t figure out what PMC stands for but I agree with your point. Frankly I don’t think there are any goodthink types of any kind involved with the Labour Party any more.
One of the many things people don’t add up about this is: if the lesser-evil cheek is in power, then they can only possibly lose power to the greater evil cheek (the arse is up to four cheeks now). So any repressive measures Starmer introduces will be inherited by reform. I happen to think that reform will only get one crack of the whip before their bubble bursts; they are even less competent than Trump and I don’t rate his chances of lasting a year in office.
So would it be better to give Labour another five years to construct the apparatus of repression for reform to employ, or would it be better to lance the boil now? I personally think that the worst possible outcome from this point is this Labour Party being rewarded with a second term.
(I was just having a hilarious conversation with a BBC journalist about this and he was giving it the whole “you must vote Labour because reform” thing. He persistently refused to acknowledge any of the things Labour have done, and ultimately blocked me when I said “Could you please comment on the panopticon thing?”)
It's hard to say what they did as the victors wrote the history. When you consider the 1900 or so war criminals the U.S. government smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war that were given key positions in the universities and arms industries it kind of makes a person wonder if they didn't pollute the U.S. kids with their barbarity. In light of what's going on today it certainly makes a person wonder.
“I was sent to see a psychiatrist at Eglin AFB. He spent and hour with me, listening as I spewed out my problem with indiscriminate killing. Since he was a psychiatrist, I told him the details of the missions, the killing of wounded, the blood, the killing of unarmed civilians, and the nuns. The tears running down my face could have filled a lake. When I finished he told me that he felt I had a problem with authority, perhaps having to do with my father. I asked him if he got his diploma from a Cracker Jack box. I asked him if he had been listening at all, or was this some sort of boilerplate diagnoses specifically made for military use. He said thanks for talking to him and he would write his report.”
The media talking heads are chosen for their mediocrity. Thinking inside the box comes naturally to them. Their message to the U.S. populace: there is safety in conformity, and we are the ultimate conformists. We are here precisely because we do not challenge authority.
Response: Because it's a colonial-settler ethnostate built on ethnic cleansing and maintained through apartheid and perpetual war. It's not a mystery. It's the logical, blood-soaked outcome of a project that requires the erasure of a people to fulfill a nationalist fantasy.
They are not evil because they're uniquely monstrous. They are evil because they are a fully militarized arm of the US-centralized empire, given carte blanche to act out the empire's most depraved impulses with zero consequences. They are a laboratory for surveillance tech, weapon testing, and propaganda techniques. They are evil because the entire narrative matrix is designed to shield them from the word "evil," to invert reality and paint the victims as savage aggressors.
But peel back one layer. The real question isn't "Why is Israel so evil?" It's "Why does the empire need a client state like this?" The answer is control. A garrison state in the heart of the Arab world. A permanent dagger. A lesson to any nation that considers defiance.
The evil is not an aberration. It's the point. And our media's job is to make you think the debate is about anything *but* that.
While the Big Brains at the NYT got the organization's name wrong, they inadvertently revealed a reality about who (or what) actually controls NATO. Here's a hint: it isn't Canada.
"These two incidents highlight the fact that the people running the western press aren’t just evil — they’re also really, really stupid."
If you don't know that NATO stands for the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization", then you have no rights to call yourself a "journalist" or even a "writer", IMO. Can you even tie your own shoe laces, or walk and chew gum at the same time? Go lie down before your sprain your brains, NYT journos!
More proof of the sub-standard education of American students. They're purposefully non-educated so they're too stupid to know they're being used as propagandists/stenographers for very evil (and very stupid) men such as Trump and Hegseth. And stupid is as stupid does.
When your social conversation is reduced to chatting about sports. trivia and Hollywood then your only source of information about daily events is limited to government propaganda and the news Media that enables it. The dumbing down of the population has been a long-term project by the State with the objective of controlling the masses and their thought so that nothing will stir them to oppose their oppressors.
Opinions contrary to the mainstream are hammered down and rendered mute. That is why US society is tailor made for a dictatorship and there won't be much of an opposition. The whole nation lacks an effective opposition party and none will emerge to fight the oppressive military oligarchy that is running the nation into the ground.
"US Troops Are REFUSING to Fight in Iran War"
Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner, who works for Center on Conscience & War, explains the unprecedented number of conscientious objector (CO) applications the organization has received in the first 24 days of the illegal and immoral war against Iran, and the general sentiment among applicants. He also notes that:
"Most people in the military don't know about our organization. ... Most people in the military don't even understand CO and that CO is an actual option that they have. It's DoD policy. It's military regulation. If you have a firm belief that those beliefs are violated by you participating in war, then you're entitled to an honorable discharge after a process that the military is obligated to follow and respect your beliefs throughout that process. So, it's a powerful tool that's available to service members, but most don't even know what it is and that it's an option that exists. They think it has to be religious or pacifist or things like that. Those things are not true. And so the number of people that have called us and wanted to start applications represents a very small sample size. And for every one of those people that has called us, I always ask them, are there other people in your unit that agree with you? They always say yes. They say that there's other people who want to file a CO but are too scared and intimidated. And there's even more people than that who agree that the war is wrong, wish they didn't have to take part in it, but don't see any other option and feel like they just have to go along with it."
"And again, all this surge came even before we were talking about a ground war and invading. The people that are calling us and saying that they don't want to take part in this, they're not people that think they are going to die. They're not people who are thinking I got to get out of this because I'm not willing to die in this war I don't agree with. These are people who do not want to hurt people in Iran for a war they do not agree with."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GckKhP6bmA
Good. Pity there weren't more of them.
It's most likely the usual case of until they see more fellow military people making the move, the rest aren't willing to be the nail that stands out for the hammer to make an example of. And then they wonder why people with their heads in the right place call them sheep.
It ain't just military men. Once you start down that road, you have to start making choices. If the society and system that we live under does so much evil, how much will I compromise with it?
These choices can have very real personal and professional consequences. Try not paying taxes and see what happens. "Bartelby the Scrivener" it ain't.
Even if you do compromise, you are left with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, if you go along with the crowd, you can avoid those tough choices and face no consequences, and your conscience stays relatively untroubled, for the time being at least. Even in the worst case, you can say to yourself that you did what every other Good German did under the circumstances.
Unfortunately that really is how the majority see it. People who are truth tellers whistle blowers or ( pardon the thought) Honest politicians are immediately persecuted and run off, by the very criminal justice system that won't prosecute the super rich super criminals.
A five year old boy spent more time in lockup than the entire Epstein Files client list.
This is the new normal of America 2.0. the criminally insane are running the country.
I'm one of those awkward people who has principles and refuses to sell out, so going along to get along doesn't appeal at all to me, in fact they are the kind of people I see in my neighborhood that sicken me more than most. I'm no good with compromise either, yes while working I paid taxes but I hardly call that compromise, just me preferring to retain my freedom to fight against those in power to the best of my abilities.Like I said on here once before, I'd sooner people say they were on the opposite side of right, that way I have something to argue against occasionally getting someone over to the right side.
Covid helped someways to sort the wheat out from the chaff, unfortunately so many got the jab it proved exactly what we were up against
Good post, thanks.
The Lab I work at now has a new policy, they would randomly search visitors accessing the public spaces, I didn't even know they did that. Now I was sent an email saying they will search all vehicles coming and going, public or users. After the upgrades to the entrances the place looks like a military base or prison. WTF.
That's awful, so now everyone has become a person to be suspicious of.
Of course they'll word it that it's for the good of everyone but we know that's not what it's all about. It's just another form of control, as in, keeping the little man/woman in their place. Be grateful we care so much about you all.
There probably would be more if so many weren't worried about facing a lifelong blacklist. The way this pseudo democracy works I'm sure that one way or another there will be reprisals.
There will be.
Back in the Viet Nam days to be CO you had to be against all wars, not a particular war. Have things changed?
I had a friend who became a Quaker so that his sons would never be required to join the Army. Seems pretty smart to me.
That's exactly why I ignore people who say the Natives were savages who attacked the immigrants in their "new world", there were a lot of quaker farmers who lived often miles from their nearest neighbours and yet, although the Natives were where they lived, they were never attacked once for the simple reason the Quakers didn't attack them first.
Johnny Appleseed, who was a real human, also comes to mind.
My family was forced to leave from the Tower of London ( A big mouth preacher) or a life sentence for speaking out against the Church of England. So in 1631 John sailed to the New World which really was an old world. We started in Mass. then down the Ohio river valley to the Mississippi river, the gold rush sent them raping and pillaging to Ca. up to Oregon where we have a glacier named for the family. The glacier has melted to the point a team will search to see if it can be saved and marked. The Indigenous should have killed them as them came to shore. What would the world be like if the Indigenous had never allowed the Murderous Monsters stepping foot in paradise. The book about my family is laughable.
Sadly they helped the Pilgrim Fathers that set foot on a land where they lived, that's where the real meaning of your Thanksgiving Day came from. After helping those who would have starved and died of cold that first long winter, the Natives taught them how to make shelters, how to hunt using bow and arrows and shared their food supplies with them. The following year the pilgrims laid on a feast for Natives and themselves and called it a Thanksgiving meal of joint feasting and laughing together. A shame the USA does not remember that.
The main thing about your family's history is that it produced good men like yourself, your family's history may be yours in one way but it does not define who you are, never forget that my friend. 💖
You know my family wrote that story so.................
And??
You are writing your own life story, you've already done a lot, only you can complete it.
How can we publicize this to all military soldiers and their families?
Mother's,father's, sisters, brothers, friends, family, acquaintance spread the word. Don't let you babies grow up to be soldiers or cops or any type of employee to government. Boycott works
Soldiers for sure. Good cops are needed.
Can we agree on Social Workers rather than armed murderous thugs? I would offer crime would disappear if the u.s. created a force like most countries have, solve the problem don't hide it in jails and prisons?
Yes, I agree. If we invested in people and our environment instead of damned weapons, we could solve so many problems.
Said with love : )
Being continually hit upside the head with a checkbook does tend to distract the mind.
A bar of gold works equally well and actually hurts a bit, not that it knocks any sense into them.
My experience of my white middle class country men and women is that they're largely rude self-absorbed consumption-directed shitheads, with certain exceptions in my fleshly and online lives. So it's no wonder that these folks are susceptible to any bullshit media wants to feed them.
I don't disagree with you at all but would expand your group to include people of color, people of working and welfare classes as well because we are all being targeted with these bullshit artists agenda, just different angles to get their desired outcome.
Yes, indeed. I just happened to have the rare displeasure today of hobbling out with my cane among that particular crowd, and the experience was less than thrilling.
I just had this delightful image of you finally having had enough, hanging onto something solid and whirling your cane about at head height amongst the crowd. 😁
At one point, when a small woman with a giant overflowing cart rolled it into my path nearly knocking me over as though I were a product display—then looked away as if nothing at all transpired—I assure you that I was tempted to wield the cane as a defensive weapon.
😂 It's the way they look at you, as if it was your fault, nothing to do with the fact they weren't paying attention to their surroundings. I bet those pointy cowboy boots would have come in handy.
Veronica, perhaps I’d better gift you a pair.
Just in case ya ever need em 😉
Ha, again thank you.
It's still not because they are white. Where I am, the behavior is split along lines of origin, with NW Europeans mostly not being overtly crude and rude and most everyone else is, in varying belligerent ways.
The government thrives on division,chaos, and hatreds, as well as secrecy and lies, violence, threats and coercion. Without willing enforcers bought with stolen loot they are nothing.
But you do also wonder, what you yourself have been "susceptible to" and what bullshit you have "digested" yourself. I mean you're right, my God, the stupidity of people - how many just throw away their lives by obediently going to a war for some obese billionaire golfer.
But I also think about all the stupid shit I've done in my life, and how my take on certain things was (sometimes) far from reality based. So how do you sail your own solitary boat through these waters? Which way do you go? Does any particular direction matter? How do you know?
the stupidest thing most people have done in their lives, is allowing an evil ruling class to rule over them. most 'bad' things we can do pale in comparison to the structural evil our rulers do every day without even have to feel guilty about.
study marxist analysis in a communist org. this is the right thing to do because it is the one thing they don't want you to do.
Bottom line for me is don't ever attack first. Fight only if you are being directly attacked. True for people and nations.
The problem is the constant narrative that convinces people that they are under attack, that the bad guys want what they have, that the bad guys are already here in ‘sleeper cells, that the bad guys will be landing on the shores of California if we don’t bomb Hanoi, Cambodia, Grenada, Baghdad, …or Teheran.
I didn't buy it when it was Vietnam, nor Iraq, and I don't buy it now. It's sickening and shocking the amount of other people's money and precious lives (both American and
foreign) that these chickenhawks so casually throw away. And the orange satan is no doubt making billions on this evil. "To the barricades!"
I didn't buy it either, but I also know it doesn't explain or fix anything to demand others to be in the same place, with the same understanding, that I have, at the same moment. And there was a time, at whatever young age it might have been, when each of us were unaware.
They are coming from places that are incomprehensible to me. I spent a lot of years writing them all off as idiots, but, today, millions of them have managed to come around, maybe some only yesterday, so I have learned the hard way, that if it's possible, it won't be in my preferred way, nor to my preferred schedule.
I admire your optimism. How much damage to everything non-human in the meantime?
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken
And the most imaginary of all? That government is always your enemy and can do no good at all. The billionaire psychopathic assholes love that particular hobgoblin of untruth.
When we look at the full impact of what government is and does it is very apparent that their own actions have created the issues that they then propose to fix with additional legislation which almost always results in loss of freedom and more harm to one group to pacify another..Minimum wage laws, environmental protections, hate crime legislation . Name it,examine it closely from both sides . Government is NOT your friend. Read some Harold L. Mencken quotes from 100 years ago. Also every argument by the so called Antifederalists presented against the ratification of the Constitution have in 250 years proved to be absolutely TRUE ABUSES we suffer today.
We have lived this nightmare many times haven't we : (
Completely agree with that.
There are times when the threats, and preemptive activities of individuals require immediate action to prevent Dangerous escalation. In essence they have actually started it by their activities and or words.
But beware of them using this as an excuse, which is the case with every aggressive US action since 1945.
I don't know that there's any way we can ever fully know, especially in terms of dissecting what exact patterns of BS we fell susceptible to over time. Memory always becomes corrupted in some fashion, even if such an analysis is attempted. So people pay shrinks. Does it help? Sometimes.
After a certain point life becomes a continuous debacle of looking back at the things you did only five years ago and saying “what on earth was I thinking?”
I think (I’m hoping) that one eventually just becomes inured to it, like, there is no hindsight, no restarts or do-overs. You can’t ever be sure of the information you’re acting on or the outcome of events in progress, so you’ve just got to steam ahead doing the best you can.
Sadly true.
I'm steaming ahead still. Though there is a lot less steam now, and a lot more reminiscing going on.
Jamenta, since I was a young person I was asking myself how do you "swim across the ocean" (metaphor for live your life) full of SHIT/FECES and come clean on the other side. Practically impossible in this sick depraved self-destructive human world.
Question everything. Don't be afraid to change your mind about something when you receive new information. Never stop learning,, And as Mark Twain said" Travel is fatal, to bigotry prejudice and narrow mindedness. " Never let your teenage self direct your adult life.
Yes Question Everything! And remember all media: government, social, entertainment is selling something that is seldom in your best interest.
My Grandfather temped me with paying for needs IF I would go to the Air Force Academy during the Vietnam war. Thankfully I am color blind or an education may have temped me even knowing what it was for. Could it be he thought it was an easy way to cut my hair : ) Writing this, an imagine of him and his fucking u.s. flag on a 20' pole in front of his house came to mind. He was such an asshole. When he died my Grandmother finally experienced love meeting a school friend. They loved each other until he died. She was so happy. On visiting we would stay up late and talk about all the things that would not be approved in her earlier life ha. Sorry, about the ramble but writing it was a treat for me. I loved her after getting to know her in her new life.
It's interesting when you get up there in age like I am now - that you really do realize how short life is. And you do wonder more than ever about the deeper Existential questions of your existence. Is life just one accident after another? Is reality some mechanical accident and our life just a mole on the buttcheek of the Universe? A mole that barely exists for an hour?
I like happy endings so nice to hear your Grandmother found some happiness near the end of her life. Love is pretty important in life. Without it, it really does become a slog.
Why I love you my friend : )
I think it depends where you live Vin. I take my business to the local bluecollar small towns and we all smile and say Hi to each other. And allow people with fewer items to go ahead of us in the checkout line!
When I visited my nephew in Denver a couple years ago, people passing you wouldn’t even look you in the eye.
True that, gyp. Generally, bigger the city, bigger the population of the assholes I describe. Statistically speaking of course.
I think it may also be a defensive mechanism Vin: bigger the city, higher the crime rate.
Don't tell the mayors that. they'll get depressed.
Har! We wouldn’t want THAT now 😁
I laughed knowing I could easily be included in that group ha. I do at times tend to be self absorbed, however I am cheap so consumption nah. hahahha Thank you for that. I wonder if Genocide-Demented Don will stop when he has shit up every country in the world or will he start the process over? Wait is that what the concentration camps are for?
Its a ploy as old as time itself. All you have to do to convince a population to go along with war is to convince them that they are under attack while branding the opposition as unpatriotic. We saw this clearly during the run-up to the Iraq War. The US Mass Media dutifully repeated Bush's lies that Saddam possessed WMD's even though the UN's chief WMD inspector said exactly the opposite. Many of us knew Bush was lying and Colin Powell's biggest regret was pushing those lies on the floor of the UN.
And that is why nobody outside of the MAGA bubble trusts a word that Trump says. He says the US was about to be "imminently" struck by Iran without a single shred of evidence. Netenyahu says they are weeks away from a nuclear weapon without a single shred of evidence. And those two MOTHERFUCKERS are burning the world down and causing a new Dark Age because of their lust for war. And the world is paying dearly for the folly of these two corrupt, old men.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Yes that is the exact quote I was looking for.
I heed the advice of experts.
Come on then, give us the citation, who, when, where?
Assuming that you were asking an honest question, an interview with Gustave Gilbert as Göring was waiting for execution at Nuremberg.
Thanks! (I was. I know I could have searched it myself but I thought you’d know and it would be useful for other people.)
No worries, then.
The R and D leaderships are solidly behind the war. Couldn't be done without them.
Colin Powell and regret should never be used in the same sentence. Colin Powell was despicable. Typical apparatchik who made career by kissing upward. Power attracts such kind of people - cheaters, liars, unethical power-hungry narcissists.
He should have been called Colon Power, talked a load of crap while climbing to the peak of his career.
Absolutely Nick! 👍 Bit late for him to have “regrets” over a million dead Iraqis!
Well done for publishing and saying - Peace be upon you by Gaza and Jerusalem - Honour and victory are the allies of the axis of resistance and its allies, and humiliation and shame are for the axis of evil, Epstein Class (USA, Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, NATO Governments, Zionist and Israel) and its allies.
🙏
Psychopathic PEDO, TRAITOR Trump, wants NATO dead, so that he can REPLACE it with HIS 'Board of <cough> Peace'!
HE wants to be.......'KING OF THE WORLD'!
(it's obvious!)
NATO should be disbanded. It was created at the end of WWII to control Europe for the future. The U.S. forces never left. They still occupy every NATO country.
It was created to fuck with the Soviet Union. (be 'protected' against)
When the USSR died.....so, too, should have NATO.
Yes, Carolyn, NATO should have been disbanded long ago. When the Soviet Union "disintegrated", Gorbachev was promised by the then President of the USA that if the USSR disbands the Warsaw Pact, NATO too would be disbanded. Gorbachev (clueless about the lying, cheating, conniving western political class) believed Reagan's word - and believing the Cold War was over agreed. Only to be confronted with an expanded NATO which gobbled up the Warsaw Pact countries.
The provoked war between Russia and Ukraine-US-NATO is a direct result of what happened then.
Trump is bored of peace more like it.
Trump is "bored to pieces." (And his brain is pretty much broken up in small pieces as well.)
How can Trump be bored of peace if he has never lived one day of it? He should be bored of eternal war.
The Board of Peace must never be allowed nuclear weapons.
When i was young i was repelled by the spectacle of a puffed up Trump humiliating some cretin on his dismal show that was grovelling for the asinine masters approval by demonstrating his conquerors qualities. I thought then that that bastard was so obviously a disgusting evil swine like the arrogant white racists of my country that he would soon be expelled like a malignant tick from a healthy organism. I read a great book by a german philosopher who used for his argument the contrast between the ego formations of Trump and Einstein, with the latters humility and realism showing by sharp contrast the ridiculous shortcomings of the current occupant of the us white house for the second time, for pitys sake. Whatever the hell as a class phenomenon that orange exemplar of profound buddist ignorance is, it is not an argument for a positive prognosis of human development in any form, but perhaps, and collectively intentionally, as suggested by the Epstein crime syndicate, the opposite. Trump is insolently foregrounded to cement as solidly as possible the dictatorship of the opulent minority of disreputable humanoids who create the gods from expensive stolen materials in their own shabby and rotting image. That the US has permitted this man two twice occupy the highest office of their nation turning it into a gang of kindergarten bullies does not reflect well on the average psyche of the country. The American state itself seems to be a proud refuge for the worst psychopathic scum that Ayn Rand can produce, and it remains a constant surprise to me that civil war has not erupted openly in its streets, or real retaliatory attacks from raped and oppressed regions have not been more prevalent, a situation that would certainly have arisen long ago if Trump was actually the dominant model for what is valuable in a human being, and not just a sick experiment gone wrong.
NATO updated its charter so that the purpose was protect of the oil supply. Russia tried to join. No dice.
If his wants were seeds, you could scatter them upon a field and they'd come up weeds.
Brainwashed and brain dead. Why do people still pay attention to mass media?
Why are some people born smarter than others? Why do some people lead lives of mostly poverty and back breaking struggle, and others, born with a silver spoon feeding them?
You’re very philosophical this morning!
As you get older, you get bored with the same old answers to the same old questions.
*Concerned that I may have given you the same old answers.*
You may have contempt for them, but you might also have pity on them.
Why? Because they still have influence, in spite of everything.
in hindsight, the holocaust looks like the beginning of the mental sickness that has taken over Israel and much of the world. Now, instead of Nazis, the murderers are Zionists. Battered children sometimes, tho not always, grow up to be battering parents. Not all Germans were or are Nazis. The Zionists have worked hard to change that by ensuring that Jewish children, continueing on into adulthood, are brainwashed to believe that they are supreme beings with the right to take whatever they want, kill whomever they please, and demand that the rest of the world support them or risk being called antisemites. Not all Jews are Zionists but all Jews are less safe with Zionism being taught to others.
You would think, after all the documentaries on the Holocaust, after some very well known films - such as "Schindler's List", and after the UN was founded, and International Laws were codified after World War II, to avoid another holocaust - after all this, including a US Constitution that is suppose to be above all tyrants or abuses of power in the US - you would think another Holocaust could have been avoidable.
And yet here we are. Some of us not for much longer (given our age). But it is astonishing that despite all the documentation we grew up with, the "Never Again" slogan many of us heard frequently in our childhood - that Never Again - has turned into, "Let's Do It Again".
jamenta, It is a real conundrum, isn't it... but all those films, documentaries, international laws had one main flaw running through them. It was formulated by the 'victors'. And from their viewpoint. The Hollywood movies brain-washed the masses. At the end of every film the hero stands in glory with his smoking gun with dead bodies all around him. Everything was settled by the gun.
Vladimir Mayakovsky - the Russian playwright, poet, artist, actor and intellectual and Communist, has famously said " Capitalism threw gold in the eyes of cinema and made it blind".
Not only cinema, but international laws and UN bodies are flawed. Only "third world"despots ever get called out and charged for crimes against humanity, when most US Presidents fit the bill.
We were given to understand that the US Constitution is perfect. But it was written by white men of property for white men of property. When we look around at the oligarchs today - even with all the amendments - nothing seems to have changed.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was always at the expense of someone else.
Spot on.
My dad always used to look a interwar Germany and ask, but there were so many good, decent people, how could they allow something so evil to be built around them?
He’s carried on voting for Labour all along; now the Labour Home Secretary is talking gushingly about her intention to turn Britain into a “panopticon” (literally that word); they have arrested thousands of people as terrorists for protesting against government policy and arrested journalists for writing books critical of them; they have abolished the right to trial by jury; and they are complicit in genocide. He is exactly modelling the Weimar Republic liberals.
Yes, but when our team does it, then that makes it okay!
Ask your pap whether he is good with the Tories, or (gasp!) Reform running the Panopticon. Because sooner or later, the goodthink PMC types at Labour will no longer be in charge.
Off the top of my head I can’t figure out what PMC stands for but I agree with your point. Frankly I don’t think there are any goodthink types of any kind involved with the Labour Party any more.
One of the many things people don’t add up about this is: if the lesser-evil cheek is in power, then they can only possibly lose power to the greater evil cheek (the arse is up to four cheeks now). So any repressive measures Starmer introduces will be inherited by reform. I happen to think that reform will only get one crack of the whip before their bubble bursts; they are even less competent than Trump and I don’t rate his chances of lasting a year in office.
So would it be better to give Labour another five years to construct the apparatus of repression for reform to employ, or would it be better to lance the boil now? I personally think that the worst possible outcome from this point is this Labour Party being rewarded with a second term.
(I was just having a hilarious conversation with a BBC journalist about this and he was giving it the whole “you must vote Labour because reform” thing. He persistently refused to acknowledge any of the things Labour have done, and ultimately blocked me when I said “Could you please comment on the panopticon thing?”)
PMC = Professional Managerial Class
Ah yes, the myth of the 6 million. The lies have gone on for many centuries.
There is no difference between the NAZIs of Germany and the Zionists of Israel and the rest of the West.
Sure there is, Peter.
Did Nazi soldiers film themselves gang-raping jews?
Did Nazis target-shoot young children in the genitals?
Did Nazis carpet-bomb starving civilians in tents?
Nahhhh…they didn’t.
It's hard to say what they did as the victors wrote the history. When you consider the 1900 or so war criminals the U.S. government smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war that were given key positions in the universities and arms industries it kind of makes a person wonder if they didn't pollute the U.S. kids with their barbarity. In light of what's going on today it certainly makes a person wonder.
“I was sent to see a psychiatrist at Eglin AFB. He spent and hour with me, listening as I spewed out my problem with indiscriminate killing. Since he was a psychiatrist, I told him the details of the missions, the killing of wounded, the blood, the killing of unarmed civilians, and the nuns. The tears running down my face could have filled a lake. When I finished he told me that he felt I had a problem with authority, perhaps having to do with my father. I asked him if he got his diploma from a Cracker Jack box. I asked him if he had been listening at all, or was this some sort of boilerplate diagnoses specifically made for military use. He said thanks for talking to him and he would write his report.”
https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/the-logical-song-supertramp-the-questions
I'd sooner have my mind looked into by a nest of sewer rats.
Catch 22
Anyone good at NYT is long gone. All stupid or co-opted.
That’s a given, Kathleen. I don’t believe anyone thinks you can work for New York ANYTHING with kissing the jewish lobby’s filthy ass.
The evidence for this is sadly plain.
The media talking heads are chosen for their mediocrity. Thinking inside the box comes naturally to them. Their message to the U.S. populace: there is safety in conformity, and we are the ultimate conformists. We are here precisely because we do not challenge authority.
If you'd like to have a constant Caitlin presence in your life, you can use this bot.
https://caitlin-bot.vercel.app/caitlin-bot.html
If you are Caitlin, you're welcome to it.
Sample-------------------------------
You asked: Why is Israel so evil?
Response: Because it's a colonial-settler ethnostate built on ethnic cleansing and maintained through apartheid and perpetual war. It's not a mystery. It's the logical, blood-soaked outcome of a project that requires the erasure of a people to fulfill a nationalist fantasy.
They are not evil because they're uniquely monstrous. They are evil because they are a fully militarized arm of the US-centralized empire, given carte blanche to act out the empire's most depraved impulses with zero consequences. They are a laboratory for surveillance tech, weapon testing, and propaganda techniques. They are evil because the entire narrative matrix is designed to shield them from the word "evil," to invert reality and paint the victims as savage aggressors.
But peel back one layer. The real question isn't "Why is Israel so evil?" It's "Why does the empire need a client state like this?" The answer is control. A garrison state in the heart of the Arab world. A permanent dagger. A lesson to any nation that considers defiance.
The evil is not an aberration. It's the point. And our media's job is to make you think the debate is about anything *but* that.
While the Big Brains at the NYT got the organization's name wrong, they inadvertently revealed a reality about who (or what) actually controls NATO. Here's a hint: it isn't Canada.
"It’s kind of amazing that any of the people involved in either of these incidents are working in news media at all.
Not amazing. Suggest you read Caitlin Johnstone's articles.
"These two incidents highlight the fact that the people running the western press aren’t just evil — they’re also really, really stupid."
If you don't know that NATO stands for the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization", then you have no rights to call yourself a "journalist" or even a "writer", IMO. Can you even tie your own shoe laces, or walk and chew gum at the same time? Go lie down before your sprain your brains, NYT journos!
More proof of the sub-standard education of American students. They're purposefully non-educated so they're too stupid to know they're being used as propagandists/stenographers for very evil (and very stupid) men such as Trump and Hegseth. And stupid is as stupid does.
When your social conversation is reduced to chatting about sports. trivia and Hollywood then your only source of information about daily events is limited to government propaganda and the news Media that enables it. The dumbing down of the population has been a long-term project by the State with the objective of controlling the masses and their thought so that nothing will stir them to oppose their oppressors.
Opinions contrary to the mainstream are hammered down and rendered mute. That is why US society is tailor made for a dictatorship and there won't be much of an opposition. The whole nation lacks an effective opposition party and none will emerge to fight the oppressive military oligarchy that is running the nation into the ground.
It does appear that way.