That’s why it’s so important to oppose this thing now: because once Palestine is erased, it’s highly unlikely that it can ever be restored. We see what an uphill battle it is to obtain any rights at all for indigenous populations in other nations founded on genocidal settler-colonialism, and they haven’t even been driven out of their national borders into foreign countries.
The Zionist plan for the Palestinians is to kill them and drive them off their land by whatever cruelty is necessary, with the understanding that one day people will look back on it in the same way they look back on the genocides of other indigenous populations, saying “Yeah it was bad, but that was in the past so there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The Zionists take a long view of history, understanding that all the outrage and backlash they’re facing over Gaza right now will one day be irrelevant if they can carry out their plan for the territory today. They know that future generations of Israeli settlers will be able to say “Sure there was an ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a bunch of mass atrocities were committed, but that all happened before I was born; I had nothing to do with it. What do you want me to do, give up the home I’ve lived in all my life? That’s nuts.”
This Thursday, the Libertarian Party received a letter from the FBI, alleging “foreign threat actors” had recently accessed our Facebook account.The FBI has a long history as one of the most nefarious enforcement and intimidation arms of the state. Their history is littered with examples of surveillance and harassment of political dissidents and groups critical of the government.We will never stop speaking the uncompromised truth about the evils and injustices of our government. Stand with us with your best donation today >>>The bill to ban TikTok is riddled with poison pills that will give the executive branch unilateral authority to shut down websites and social media accounts they believe to be compromised by foreign actors.By alleging supposed “foreign threat actors” influence in our operations, they are setting the table to shut us down and silence the last dissenting voice in national party politics.
Beltway swamp monsters like Lieberman only get called “centrist” and “moderate” because they have ideological overlap with both of the increasingly indistinguishable mainstream political parties in the United States, both of which reliably support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism, and oligarchy.
The imperial press have revealingly been using the words “moderate” and “centrist” to eulogize the warmongering former US senator Joe Lieberman, who passed away on Wednesday.
“Centrist former Sen. Joseph Lieberman has died at 82,” reads a headline by NPR.
“As a moderate Democrat, Mr Lieberman developed a reputation in Washington for crossing party lines — as well as simply crossing members of his own party,” says the BBC.
“Joe Lieberman, a former longtime Connecticut senator and moderate Democrat who became the first Jewish American nominated to a major party’s presidential ticket as Al Gore’s 2000 running mate, died Wednesday at age 82,” writes The Wall Street Journal.
“Joe Lieberman, centrist senator and first Jew on major US presidential ticket, dies at 82,” reads a headline from The Times of Israel.
Joe Lieberman was a fairly unremarkable Washington politician who managed to get famous by becoming a particularly enthusiastic, inveterate warmonger and corporate marionette within the Democratic Party. https://t.co/DzUaOTnm0n
In reality, there was never anything moderate about Joe Lieberman. He was a violent extremist, who only looked like he walked a political center line through the lens of a violent extremist empire.
“Like most fiscal hawks, Lieberman is also an all-around hawk, unconcerned with government spending when it’s in the service of bombing some far-off country or another. It’s hard to find a war Lieberman hasn’t supported, from both wars against Iraq (he was one of only ten Senate Democrats to vote for the first), to the Balkans in the ’90s, to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, an ambiguous commitment in Ukraine, and many others.
“If you’re a fan of the bloated, largely unaccountable centralized security bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, thank Lieberman: he not only came up with the idea but introduced the legislation that created it. He also supported the terrifying appointments of John Bolton under both Bush and Donald Trump, citing his ‘strong moral compass.’”
Beltway swamp monsters like Lieberman only get called “centrist” and “moderate” because they have ideological overlap with both of the increasingly indistinguishable mainstream political parties in the United States, both of which reliably support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism, and oligarchy. Their differences are presented as massive by the imperial propaganda services known as the mainstream press to create the illusion of choice and competition, but they actually sit within an extremely narrow ideological bandwidth on the political spectrum.
RIP Joe Lieberman. Not only did he lie about Iraq and WMD in 2003, he was still lying about it eight years later in 2011, and for extra credit did it in an incredibly smarmy and sexist way. https://t.co/0SCLqiyPxWpic.twitter.com/IPvmQZoDvL
One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to begin with the assumption that the truest and most accurate position must lie somewhere near the center of the two major political perspectives you see laid out all around you.
While the awesome spectacle of the bridge collapse traumatized the country, it also brought to mind the fantastic flow of ten-thousand illegal border crossings a day, stage-managed by the “Joe Biden” Homeland Security team. Did you kind of wonder how many in that 10K-a-day flow might be the same species of Central Asian mutts who volunteered to slaughter over 150 (so far) Russian concert-goers? Nobody is checking who they are, you realize.
“A modern nuc can fit in the trunk of a compact car. When millions of people can walk across our border with impunity what do you think the chances are we would catch something that size?” — Sam Faddis, Retired CIA
Who was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.
“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company — since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass. . . rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’s helm. . . stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.
The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterfuck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime), and by now had surely sung their hearts out to persuasive interrogators of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the take-away being that President VV Putin has got to be mighty pissed-off and itching for revenge. Was the FSK Bridge take-down the first repayment for that, lots of people inside and outside Blob Central were probably wondering?
You’d also have to wonder, qua the bridge disaster itself, about the implied reverberations through the insurance industry. Consider that the insurance industry is a major cog in the machinery of finance and banking, since insurance company reserves are traditionally allocated in supposedly safe sovereign treasury bonds. Liquidations anyone? Maritime insurance was already groaning under the burden of all that monkey-business in the Red Sea, thanks to Houthi rocket and drone attacks on the shipping of Western Civ. Are the banks quaking harder now? Many across Western Civ were already trembling before the FSK Bridge job.
“Price controls almost invariably produce black markets, where prices are not only higher than the legally permitted prices, but also higher than they would be in a free market, since the legal risks must also be compensated. While small-scale black markets may function in secrecy, large-scale black markets usually require bribes to officials to look the other way.”
It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say – which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.
How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else. . . . It follows that defensive violence may only be used against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property—and may not be used against any nonviolent “harm” that may befall a person’s income or property value. (emphasis added)
It is by no means straightforward to decide what “directly threatened invasion” means in specific cases.
Self-defense is an ancient common law right under which necessary and reasonable force may be used to defend one’s person or property. As Sir Edward Coke expressed it in 1604: “The house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence . . . if thieves come to a man’s house to rob him, or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any of the thieves in defense of himself and his house, it is no felony, and he shall lose nothing.”
The meaning of reasonable force has always been heavily context dependent, considering the facts of the case including the intentions of the parties. If a trial were to become necessary in the scenario described by Coke, the court would have to establish that the intruders were indeed thieves intent on robbery or murder, or at any rate that the homeowner reasonably believed this to be the case. The use of force to defend oneself from an attack inherently carries the risk of causing the attacker’s death, making it necessary to ascertain that this was not merely a homicide masquerading as self-defense. Otherwise, anyone could shoot another and argue that he thought it was an intruder, as happened in the Oscar Pistorius case.
If the attacker shoots first, it is clearly not unreasonable to shoot back. Difficult cases arise where the attacker is unarmed or armed only with the natural weapons of his own fists. The old common law rule, as reported by the Michigan Law Review in 1904, was that
it was not necessary the assault should have been made with a deadly weapon, but that an assault with the fists alone, if there was apparent purpose and ability to inflict death or serious bodily injury, was sufficient to justify the killing in self-defense. . . . a mere battery by the fists alone, will not justify an homicide, even where there is a great disparity of physical power, without a plain manifestation of felonious intent.
The felonious intent of the attacker (intention to inflict death or serious bodily injury) has long been treated as key to justifying killing the attacker, and such intention could only be judged in all the circumstances of the case. Mere words would not suffice, as one might shout, “I’ll kill you!” with neither felonious intent nor ability, and conversely an intention and ability to kill may be exhibited clearly without any words being uttered.
In the context of comparative law, Uwe Steinhoff controversially goes further to argue that self-defense ought to be lawful even if the attacker did not use his fists: “An attack need not involve physical force; rather, an attack is every threat of violation or actual violation of an interest that is protected by law (that is, of a right) insofar as this threat stems from human action.” Steinhoff distinguishes between an “attack” and “harm” as in his view one is still entitled to defend oneself against an attack without waiting to see the degree of harm, if any, that might result from the attack.
Imagine a scenario where a weak and puny man launches himself at a weightlifting champion with intention to cause harm, only for the attacker’s fists to bounce ineffectually off his victim (as happened once to Arnold Schwarzenegger). In Steinhoff’s view, the victim in this case, bigger and stronger than his attacker though he may be, would nevertheless have a right to defend himself with a reasonable degree of force.
The aim in mentioning these examples is not to comment on the current law, which is too heavily circumscribed by legislation and case law to permit brief summary. The aim here is instead to highlight some of the difficulties in ascertaining the boundaries of self-defense. Legislative rules are typically detailed and encompass numerous conditions and exceptions.
For example, in New York, “deadly physical force” generally cannot be used unless
“the actor reasonably believes that such other person [the attacker] is using or about to use deadly physical force. Even in such case, however, the actor may not use deadly physical force if he or she knows that with complete personal safety, to oneself and others he or she may avoid the necessity of so doing by retreating.”
That is easy to state, but in reality, how would one “know that with complete personal safety” violence can be avoided by retreating? In many circumstances where deadly force is used or threatened, there are no guarantees of “complete personal safety.” In Steinhoff’s example, it is rarely clear that there is no other way to save Snow White other than by taking out the evil queen: “Yet one is certainly allowed to tackle the evil queen with physical force in order to prevent her from giving the apple to Snow White if there is no other way to save Snow White.”
