the normalization of gun violence in the US is crazy. 14 year olds with AR-15s shooting up their schools. Presidential candidates dodging bullets every few weeks.

And it’s all so dang normal now that they will barely last a news cycle.

The Three Mile Island nuclear plant is being restarted, exclusively to power Microsoft's data centers.
First time a US nuclear plant has ever been recommissioned

Reddit really is a horrible website full of liberals lol. I was looking at some memes about the neoliberal mayoral candidate in Brazil who hit a far-right guy over the head with a chair and then threw the chair at him live on TV during a debate, because the guy accused him of being aremoved and made fun of the fact that a member of his family had died. Then the far-right guy left crying in an ambulance because he thought he broken his rib and today he had a meltdown because someone brought the same kind of chair near him during a march he was doing.

Anyway, on reddit, someone made a post on some English-speaking subreddit and the comments were flooded with liberals saying: “I hate violence! That's not democracy! When he attacked the far-right guy, he became just like the far-right guy!” and some Brazilian gusanos insisting that the guy isn't far-right, even though the guy openly said he likes Bolsonaro and Trump, he said he wants to be the new Bolsonaro or some shit, honestly, this guy has a strange accent. And, of course, most of these Brazilians come from the south of Brazil, from mostly pro-Bolsonaro places (the same state that was destroyed because the Liberal and Conservative parties there stole the money that was supposed to be set aside for natural disasters and had to beg Lula for help).

Just came across some random meme channel video about "explaining the exploding pagers in lebanon meme". Fucking demons that westerners and their allies are. But a red upside down triangle is a hate symbol and makes them piss their pants. Death to the west.

all the business press going "there is no alternative to IMF austerity" on Sri Lanka.

smaller countries like Sri Lanka always gets fucked over more under capitalism. not saying other global south countries are less vulnerable but with smaller countries IMF can force even a well meaning pro-worker Government into doing what they want. no coups or assassinations required.

India really is the best candidate for the next socialist state imo, large population, one of the larger countries, enough resources, relatively industrialized and the Indian Rupee is more widely used internationally.

The Taiwanese pager company said that they're just giving their brand to the product but the pagers are actually manufactured by a hungarian company. The hungarian company said they didn't make the pagers, they're just an in-between, but refuse to say where the pagers were made.

Large scale Zionist air strikes currently taking place in southern Lebanon. The fuckers are really going for it

incoming doomer opinion: the Battle of Huế proves that South Vietnam and the US are still absolutely in this fight and we'll probably see this war wrapped up soon as the Tet Offensive is failing

https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/niger-us-troops-withdrawal-t84623

U.S. troops withdraw from Niger, except for the embassy

Brazilian lawyer hired as X's legal representative quits position. Vanessa Souza, a lawyer currently based in England, was hired in the middle of this month as X's legal representative in Brazil, but the deal between her and Musk fell through even before the announcement.

Seeing some people call this resistance fight the 'Gaza Ghetto Uprising' and like damn

that hits hard

Given the scale of what took place and the response from the West not just to dismiss it but to justify and even celebrate it; given that this act of terrorism occurred exactly a week from 9/11, I think it's time to finally talk about 9/11 and though, yes, while inserting the two decade boilerplate about condemning terrorism and recognizing the innocent lives lost, to assess what it really meant.

Who “won” after 9/11?

It has been said endlessly in the two decades since 9/11 that the attacks that day permanently ended the unipolar euphoria of the US Cold War victory: it derailed the consolidation of US unipolarity by diverting it into two decade-long West Asian entanglements. Especially nowadays with the US unipolar status in complete disarray, you frequently see US policy makers and the Washington think tank blob cry crocodile tears about what a "gift" 9/11 was to China. This is not necessarily untrue, Bush had been priming for a confrontation with China even as he allowed its entry into the WTO. Then 9/11 happened and it wasn't until Obama, exactly ten years later, that finally formalized the policy shift of the "Pivot to Asia,” which due the innumerable contradictions of US hegemony forcing it to react to Europe and (once again) West Asia, is still a “work in progress” in the present day.

The US fixation with its West Asian conflicts did allow China a breathing space for much of an additional decade until Trump finally took the US jumping with both feet into the New Cold War. Though there was always the Washington think tank cope as the US got bogged down that the puppet Afghanistan project was actually a 5D chess move that would allow a US presence right on the doorstep of Western China and meant the two decade occupation would allow the US to have its cake and eat it too, the total rout of the US with its 2021 Saigon moment nullified even that.

There used to be rather infamous op-eds from NYT and what-not, once the 9/11 self-censorship taboo faded a little, asking rhetorically if "Bin Laden won?" From the perspective of US unipolar hegemony, it does look like the attack did an incalculable damage not through the event itself but the US outsized reaction to it. However, is US hegemony really what matters most to the US political ruling class, "über alles?"


The specific attacks of 9/11 didn’t attack the elementary schools, they didn’t attack LGBT clubs, they didn’t attack parades; Americans would target those places themselves. They attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the other plane didn’t crash land in Pennsylvania, the consensus based on its DC bound flight path after two decades is still that It would have likely been flown into the White House or the US Capitol building. As such the targets were principally the financial elite, the military elite and the political elite.

There was supposed to have been a precedent set with Pearl Harbor that the United States was never to be attacked, or in Roosevelt’s own words in his “Day of Infamy” speech: “will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The consequence for Pearl Harbor was the two nuclear bombs and the permanent semi-occupation and vassalage of the perpetrating Japan to the present day.

Pearl Harbor: the previous attack on “America”

As Daniel Immerwehr wrote in “How to Hide an Empire,” in the eyes of the US political elite like Roosevelt, an attack on Hawaii, nearly 5000 miles from Washington DC, was more of an opportunity than a threat to themselves. Not only that, in the just recently forcibly annexed settler-colonial holding of Hawaii (still not a state) far from the continental US, there was a chance that the average American also would fail to see it as a threat. As such, Roosevelt’s draft edits allude to an anxiety that the American people wouldn’t get it at all:

[…] when it came to Hawai‘i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. Though the territory had a substantial white population, nearly three quarters of its inhabitants were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make.

Roosevelt insisted: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” Yet taken from the eyes of the American ruling class, Pearl Harbor, in comparison to 9/11, is respectively akin to someone setting your front lawn (which you just expanded in size by forcibly seizing from a neighbor) on fire compared to literally coming for your jugular with a knife. You can see someone setting your lawn on fire as the greatest possible threat to you only if you can never even conceive the possibility of someone being able to take a blade to your throat. The greatest threat to the ruling class was supposed to be just to their way of life, not to their very lives themselves.

The Unthinkable becomes Thinkable and the Impossible is actually Done

9/11 not only negated the historical meme that Americans propagandized themselves with that “they were geographically gifted” on their stolen continent and “untouchable,” buried under lines of defence from enemies with territorial meat-shields like Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Britain, Western Europe and West Berlin that would-be adversaries would be forced to chew through first like layers on an onion; it also struck at not principally the working class masses but the literal elite themselves. Generations of American imperialism was supposed to have created an utterly vast breathing space and this “lebenstraum” was meant to make the continental US on which the US ruling class inhabit untouchable.

Even in the scenario of "World War 3," so long as it remains conventional, in the geo-strategic calculus of the US ruling class, those immense territorial meat shields that it set up (for China: the first island chain, then the second, then the third; for Russia: the former USSR territories like Ukraine, then the former Warsaw Pact NATO, then Western Europe) mean that it would take a "World War 4" for a conflict to conceivably reach the continental US, let alone threaten the elite themselves who could scurry into their bunkers in Cheyenne mountain if things get too hot.

9/11 cut past all of this calculus like a hot knife through butter and brought the truly utterly unthinkable to realization, not only was the US squatter state on occupied Turtle Island subject to attack but the ruling class themselves were the ones specifically targeted. It’s like the hierarchy of needs where you never realized, through your privileged material conditions, there was an even lower base on the pyramid of your needs that you had been always standing on and which could be pulled out from under you.

This is the reason for the overwhelming and psychopathic US military response and the two decade commitment to devastate West Asia. The lesson needed to be taught that that what was make thinkable and possible must be made unthinkable and impossible again. Of course, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but though the emperor was revealed to have no clothes, the world needed to be made to pretend he was still fully clothed - at gunpoint.

Through this, it didn’t really matter whether Iraq and Afghanistan could be built into stable client regimes to service US hegemonic interests, but that as much devastation as possible should be done so that every time someone glances at the misery of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, they would link it to the US and think that “this all happened because 9/11 attacked the US.” By such aims, the bigger the bloodbath, the better. Through this, the US ruling class really did achieve their goals, despite the ultimate failure of both invasions and occupations.

The Contradiction of Life and Way of Life

Does all this mean that the much bemoaned “wasted decade” for the US is actually a rare species of camouflaged victory if you look further into it? No, that would stretch the provided thesis too far. What the US reaction to 9/11 shows that there is a contradiction between the interests of US hegemony, which benefits all Americans through the dividends of its financial imperialism and the interests of the US ruling class, which benefit only itself and its preservation, which 9/11 was experienced as a startling reminder to them.

That there exists a distinction between the two, though in normal times both are aligned and in near perfect sync, is what 9/11 exploited and the US response has shown to exist more clearly than in any other moment in American history. The outsized retaliation by the ruling class to reassert their “untouchability” through the “counterterrorism decade” was actually a net negative for both normal Americans and for the system of US hegemony, but the ruling class did not care because 9/11 was what shown them that - when forced to choose - their individual life were more important than their way of life.

To put it in analogy, this is akin to a business owner unhesitatingly sacrificing the profitability of their own business, making it far less competitive to rivals, by a fire sale of assets and diverting earnings to pay for their own emergency surgical procedure. At that point, to that individual, there are bigger things at stake when made to realize they are forced to choose, even though what normally matters is their business and it suffers through this opportunity cost. Becoming cognizant of this contradiction is the most revealing lesson of the US response to 9/11.

Anti-woke Final Fintasy 16, set in "Whites-Only" fake medieval Europe, "did not meet sales expectations"

https://www.eurogamer.net/square-enix-admits-final-fantasy-16.html

The pagers that were being used were apparently made in Taiwan.

EDIT: Just saw CCTV video of one going off on the Lebanon subreddit. Definitely explosives and not thermal runaway.

Some positive news in this sea of torment, death and terrorism:

The DPRK's Women's U-20 National Football Team won 1-0 over the genocidal entity, the "United States", and have reached the final of the 2024 Women's U-20 World Cup, ready to face Japan.

The DPRK has a pretty impressive Women's U-20 record, they won the 2006 final against China in Russia, reached the final and lost to the "United States" in 2008 in Chile, won the final against France in 2016 in Papua New Guinea and now have reached their fourth final in Colombia.

They won their three group stage matches (6-2 vs Argentina, 9-0 vs Costa Rica and 2-0 vs Netherlands), in the Round of 16 they beat Austria 5-2, in the Quarter Finals they beat Brasil 1-0 and now they've beaten the "US" 1-0 in the Semi-Finals.

Let's go ladies!

Israel straight up bombing Lebanon now.

https://t.me/QudsNen/123446

Hundreds of Hezbollah members wounded in Lebanon when pagers explode, security source says

deleted reuters link

wtf

edited: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/17/israels-war-on-gaza-live-38-killed-as-israel-risks-becoming-pariah?update=3184475

i just wanted to link to something. my bad, no more reuters

EDIT: Should probably note here that Zhao DaShuai is quite open about being People's Armed Police Propaganda Bureau

Murdered US activist shot 'directly in the head' by "Israeli" army: The "Israeli" military had claimed 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot 'indirectly and unintentionally' during a protest in the West Bank | The Cradle

theres now a video going around of Israeli soldier throwing a Palestinan from a Rooftop in Jenin , Westbank.

(CW: Explosion injury) Channel 4 News opens their segment on the Israeli attack by joking "Israel calling?"

youtube has reminded me that the US is scrapping the nato standardized ammunition scheme just to cut sig sauer a fat check how are these people running an empire dude

Were the pagers only being carried by the armed wing of Hezbollah, or am I correct in assuming that a lot of political/social wing members were also carrying them?

State of Hexbear rn

https://www.rt.com/news/604290-israel-lebanon-brink-war/

https://www.rt.com/news/604338-pager-plot-years-abc/

Apparently it wasn't just pagers and walkie talkies but also laptops and car radios and had been planned for up to 15 years.

Israel bombing Lebanon right now.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/9/21/israels-war-on-gaza-live-inconceivable-toll-of-human-suffering-in-gaza?update=3193056

8 minutes ago:

The National News Agency reports an unmanned aerial vehicle fired two missiles at the border town of Dahra.
Earlier, the Israeli military said dozens of warplanes are attacking Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon as cross-border exchanges intensify and fears grow of all-out war between the decades-old enemies.

1 hour ago:

The situation is getting much more intense, especially in the southern part of Gaza where confrontations between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in Rafah city are still raging. The combat is particularly heavy in the eastern and central areas of Rafah.
This is despite the Israeli army’s claim that it managed to “dismantle” Hamas’s Rafah Brigades in the city last week.
Also, one of the main medical warehouses has been hit in Rafah without any sort of warning, causing a great deal of destruction. There was no word on casualties.

I'm guessing that medical warehouse might have been that massive explosion seen here?

• Reddit/TrueAnon
• Twitter photo

Something bad or violent happened in America? Well, it was definitely caused by some poorly defined "mental illness" and it couldn't possibly be an expected outcome of four hundred years of bloodshed, oppression, poverty, and unspeakable cruelty.

Definitely just those crazy people. We should probably make them illegal.

Reddit is so astroturfed it’s funny “DAE think Hezbollah should resign cuz of this failure???”

Before this week, I had assumed that Israel was attempting to get Hezbollah to attack them in order to give Israel just enough casus belli to pull the US into it.

While that may be part of it, the terrorist attacks this week (including the destroyed apartment building just now) have made me think it’s all just Israel trying to get Hezbollah to invade Israel so Israel doesn’t have to invade Lebanon. Israel is just going to keep ratcheting up the horror until Hezbollah decides they have to do something (which they won’t, Hezbollah’s only offensive capabilities are with missiles).

I don’t think we should assume that just because the entity’s military leadership are fascists that they are also completely irrational. If a bunch of commies on this poxy website can see how obvious it is that Israel will get rolled if they invade Lebanon, it has to be even more obvious to someone like Gallant who is evil but also seems like a realist.

So right now we have a situation where Hezbollah cannot invade Israel, and Israel cannot invade Lebanon. Each wants the other to invade, but they both know it’s a death sentence for either of them to attempt it. So what I think we’re seeing is a game of provoking the other to invade, and Israel probably thinks they are in the better position because they have more latitude to do evil shit.

(All of this is probably obvious to most, just summarizing it all here).

So Israel successfully pulls off their Bond villain-ass plot, and they aren't immediately invading in the chaos it caused? What's the goal there? If it's just to kill people, sending planes to bomb would work and not give away the secret plan. Maybe I'm overestimating their intelligence, but if I had sabotaged a country I wanted to invade, I'd wait until I was about to invade to activate it.

CW - transphobia, other horrors

Uh

Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

. . .

Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.

Newest from Hungary: According to NYT's anoonimus sources the hungarian company was founded by Israel precisely so they can put explosives into Hezbollah's (and by this they mean whomever is around the pagers at the time of explosion) pockets.

Newest from Palestine: Hezbollah doesn't stop and according to zionazi media already yeeted a soldier with a guided missile.

Doctor Ziad Mohammed Al-Dalou, the Deputy Director of the Internal Medicine Department at Al-Shifa Hospital, ascended to martyrdom in detention three days after his abduction by zionist forces on March 21st, 2024.

He is one of dozens of prisoners who have ascended to martyrdom due to zionist abuse and torture. Additionally, he is one of 900 health workers who have ascended to martyrdom, representing about 1 in 40 martyrs.

Glory to the martyrs.

https://t.me/PalestineResist/57812

Editor’s note: they killed him in 3 days??? He was just kidnapped this week

Preliminary reports that Israel did it again

⚠️ A new of sabotage attacks in Beirut and all Lebanon, objects are exploding in houses and everywhere!

https://t.me/LebUpdate/42975

Appears to be walkie talkies this time

https://t.me/LebUpdate/42983

🥀 Lebanon's health ministry says nine people have been killed and more than 300 are wounded in the walkie-talkie blasts across Lebanon this afternoon.

Some of the devices that exploded are almost a decade old, bought off the civilian market.

https://t.me/LebUpdate/42988

MEE - Florida lawmaker sparks outrage for celebrating Turkish-American activist's killing in West Bank

Randy Fine, the Republican state representative for Florida, is facing a wave of anger and accusations of Islamophobia after celebrating the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish-American activist who was fatally shot by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.

"Throw rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerrorist. #FireAway," Fine wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to a post announcing Eygi's killing last weekend.

This is a Florida State Representative and a white one attacking Palestinians at that, so I expect nothing to happen to him.

So, latest update about the Norwegian owner of the company linked to the terror attack in Lebanon...

He was on a business trip to the U.S. when the attacks happened. VG, a Norwegian news outlet, writes that he got on a plane to Boston on Tuesday, but never attended the conference he was scheduled for:

The man was to attend a conference in Boston on behalf of his Norwegian employer, according to VG's information.

VG has seen documentation that the Norwegian arrived in the USA on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, he never took out his name tag or registered at the conference, the organizer told VG.

He's (probably?) still in the U.S., but no one has heard from him since Wednesday 👀

Picture of an IOF bullet fired by Apache helicopters which the occupation has been using to target civilians since the start of the genocide war.

Hezbollah announces targeting the Rafael military-industrial complex, which specializes in electronic equipment and is located in the Zvulun Valley north of occupied Haifa. The complex was hit with dozens of "Fadi 1," "Fadi 2," and "Katyusha" rockets in an initial response to the brutal massacre committed by the Israeli enemy in various Lebanese regions on Tuesday and Wednesday (the massacre involving pagers and walkie-talkie devices).

https://t.me/mmirlb/22740

(Picture is not of the Rafael facility but nearby)

Incoming doomer opinion: doom will come to Israel one fucking way or another comrades

1965 Soviet Film Обыкновенный фашизм. (Ordinary Fascism) is entirely made up of Nazi archival footage captured by the Soviets and narrated with cynical voice over.

https://youtu.be/MLR3g6E2pZA

At 1 hour and 35 minute is a series of photos that nazi soldiers took as souvenirs of them lynching civilians and carrying out other unspeakably horrible crimes. Yet they are grinning about it. The narrator says "they seem nice".

It is revealed that the nazi soldiers kept these stacks of "souvenir" photos along with pictures of their wives and children.

I am reminded of this film after seeing another video of iof soldiers celebrating their destruction of Gaza.