"Two common goals of these cosmetic 'normalizing' surgeries on children’s genitals are to enable #heterosexual penetrative intercourse, and to help the child #conform to #gender and sexual norms"
The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population >>
"The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, #biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, #civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough #babies.
“The entire global #financial system, the value of your money, and every #asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth...." >>
>> ...#natalist#ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more #kids, and fast.
Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “#white#genocide is real,” says better means #conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the #Marriage and #Religion Institute at the #Catholic University of America, says good #children are the product of stable, two-parent #Christian households,...>>
Did you know that #Shinzo Abe's grandfather was known as a #monster?
This is a 19-point #thread on the tumultuous years during & after #WW2 from Japan's POV, on the #problem of #US peace-keeping efforts & on Japan's ongoing nepotism issues.
#AI#AGI#ComputerScience#Hype#Ideology: "This introductory essay for the special issue of First Monday, “Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power,” considers how power operates in AI and machine learning research and publication. Drawing on themes from the seven contributions to this special issue, we argue that what can and cannot be said inside of mainstream computer science publications appears to be constrained by the power, wealth, and ideology of a small cohort of industrialists. The result is that shaping discourse about the AI industry is itself a form of power that cannot be named inside of computer science. We argue that naming and grappling with this power, and the troubled history of core commitments behind the pursuit of general artificial intelligence, is necessary for the integrity of the field and the well-being of the people whose lives are impacted by AI."
Ahh yes, murdering the opposition into compliance, definitely winning the hearts and minds there.
Putin is undeniably popular in Russia, having reversed neoliberal policies and bringing political stability after yeltsins shock therapy. Crimea: That’s a lot of people no? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgMZBjgCFHo
they got politically outmaneuvered.
Ukraine seems to be a pawn in your worldview. Ok.
They [Russia] didn’t try to join NATO three times.
You missed how Navalny was propped up by the West??
You’re asking why they wanted to join NATO for protection when they already have Russians occupying parts of their eastern territory?
You’re talking about 08’ Bucharest Summit? The Russian federation was still in a join council with NATO at the time, and neither Ukraine nor Georgia were a priority to him
NATO–Russia relations stalled and subsequently started to deteriorate, following the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004–2005 and the Russo-Georgian War in 2008. 2004–2007
In the years 2004–2006, Russia undertook several hostile trade actions directed against Ukraine and the Western countries (see #Trade and economy below). Several highly publicised murders of Putin’s opponents also occurred in Russia in that period, marking his increasingly authoritarian rule and the tightening of his grip on the media (see #Ideology and propaganda below).
In 2006, Russian intelligence performed an assassination on the territory of a NATO member state.[citation needed] On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who specialised in tackling organized crime and advised British intelligence and coined the term “mafia state”, suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised after poisoning with polonium-210; he died from the poisoning on 23 November.[55] The events leading up to this are well documented, despite spawning numerous theories relating to his poisoning and death. A British murder investigation identified Andrey Lugovoy, a former member of Russia’s Federal Protective Service (FSO), as the main suspect. Dmitry Kovtun was later named as a second suspect.[56] The United Kingdom demanded that Lugovoy be extradited, however Russia denied the extradition as the Russian constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian citizens, leading to a straining of relations between Russia and the United Kingdom.[57]
Subsequently, Russia suspended in 2007 its participation in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. 2008 Meeting of the NATO–Russia council in Bucharest, Romania on 4 April 2008
In 2008, Russia condemned the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo,[58] stating they “expect the UN mission and NATO-led forces in Kosovo to take immediate action to carry out their mandate … including the annulling of the decisions of Pristina’s self-governing organs and the taking of tough administrative measures against them.”[59] Russian President Vladimir Putin described the recognition of Kosovo’s independence by several major world powers as “a terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries”, and that “they have not thought through the results of what they are doing. At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face”.[60] Europe was not unanimous in this matter, and a number of European countries have refused to recognise the sovereignty of Kosovo, while a number of further European nations did so only to appease the United States.[citation needed]
Nevertheless, the heads of state for NATO Allies and Russia gave a positive assessment of NATO-Russia Council achievements in a Bucharest summit meeting in April 2008,[61] though both sides have expressed mild discontent with the lack of actual content resulting from the council.
In early 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush vowed full support for admitting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, to the opposition of Russia.[62][63] The Russian Government claimed plans to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia may negatively affect European security. Likewise, Russians are mostly strongly opposed to any eastward expansion of NATO.[64][65] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated in 2008 that “no country would be happy about a military bloc to which it did not belong approaching its borders”.[66] Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin warned that any incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would cause a “deep crisis” in Russia–Ukraine relations and also negatively affect Russia’s relations with the West.[67]
Relations between NATO and Russia soured in summer 2008 due to Russia’s war with Georgia. Later the North Atlantic Council condemned Russia for recognizing the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions of Georgia as independent states.[68] The Secretary General of NATO claimed that Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia violated numerous UN Security Council resolutions, including resolutions endorsed by Russia. Russia, in turn, insisted the recognition was taken basing on the situation on the ground, and was in line with the UN Charter, the CSCE Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and other fundamental international law;[69] Russian media heavily stressed the precedent of the recent Kosovo declaration of independence.
#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Polarization#Ideology: "Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. And when that happens, in any forum, the posters blame the mods.
The mods do have supporters: “normie” liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function. A central question of our current moment is whether that faith is enough to unite a critical mass of voters, or whether the medium we have chosen for everything, from photos of our children to our most private conversations, will simply not allow for any consensus, especially one that appeals to a population as broadly complacent as the American consumer class. Normies, who are mostly unified in their defense of the status quo, still wield a reasonable amount of political power, and they will continue to exist in some form. But, as even more of our lives take place within the distortions of online life, how much longer will there be a widely agreed-upon status quo to defend?" https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/arguing-ourselves-to-death
People who are so eager to #police some #ideologies often neglect to figure into the calculation just how many people want to police their #ideology, and just how few people actually share their exact views outside of their social bubbles. This uneasy agreement among #Americans to keep the state out of what you believe isn't as bad as you think.
Zizek explores many different ideologies that crop up around the topic of ecological disaster.
I don't agree with everything he says. I'm sharing this nevertheless, because it made me think if the reason for my objections is due to the text hitting too close to home.
Is there any merit to framing conflicts of the recent past in ideological terms?
For example, the events leading up to WWII could be described as #fascism vs #communism, until you learn about the economic and military pacts Bolsheviks made with Hitler and Mussolini.
Sure, Brownshirts were fighting communists on the streets of Berlin, but once each side captured their own state, differences were set aside for the greater project of making their respective nations stronger.
As the United States faces yet another showdown over the federal debt ceiling, we examine the roots of the conflict by looking at the "North/Paul Strategy," a decades-old plan to provoke a financial collapse and then seize power. Rooted in libertarian economic theory and Christian Reconstructionist doctrine, Gary North and Ron Paul's ideas laid the foundation for the Tea Party and later, January 6th.
Dave chats with James Scaminaci III, a scholar and expert on Fourth Generation Warfare, and Frederick Clarkson, who has been studying religious extremism for decades, and is an expert on the New Apostolic Reformation.
They look at why economic eschatology is a persistent feature of American political life, and how we might break the vicious "cycle of doom."
Great interview. I especially liked the part where he connected energy-blindness of mainstream economics with its ideological role in maintaining contemporary power structures.
We, the artists and patrons of #music in #Australia, condemn in the strongest possible terms #Knotfest and the headliner of this year’s tour, #Pantera.
Pantera’s singer, #PhilAnselmo, has been documented on multiple occasions to be promoting #whitesupremacist/fascist/neo-nazi #ideology. These actions have led to the recent cancellation of a great many of the band’s concerts in #Europe.
It seems that young #women (perhaps influenced by the #MeToo movement & #feminism more generally) are becoming more 'liberal' on issues from #migration to #racism when compared to males of the same age.
John Burn-Murdoch (FT) argues while this has been relatively down-played due to young people's relative lack of engagement with formal #politics (they vote less), this shift in the #gender patterns around #ideology may start to have a major impact on #politics in years to come.
"Authentic ‘consciousness raising’ can only be the ‘raising’ of people’s thinking to the level’ of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness: developing their basic subjectivity, free of #ideology and imposed morality in all its forms.
The essence of what many leftists, therapy-mongers, racism awareness trainers and sisterisers term ‘consciousness raising’ is their practice of beating people into unconsciousness with their ideological billyclubs."
"Possessed by an ideology, you may feel that your speech is divinely inspired, or that the wisdom of the ancients is speaking through you. Or at minimum you can be absolutely certain of its truth without checking, because it unambiguously aligns with—it authentically expresses—the Higher Truth of the system itself."
I see these lists all the time and they always piss me off. Train yourself in the dominant ideology! Despite some of the titles, do NOT think critically about your society! Work, act, and think like a good, aspiring (if temporarily embarrassed) capitalist! Be more selfish! Cultivate traditional masculine virtues!
#SCOTUS clerks are… the sort of ambitious #lawyers likely to wield significant #influence in their post-clerk lives. What makes #Justice#ClarenceThomas’s #clerks so remarkable… is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular #ideology. …an examination of what the justice & his wife call #ThomasClerkWorld, based on interviews w/people in & around it & a review of private emails & the Thomases’ public stmnts, shows how meticulously the couple have cultivated the network over decades.
Understand that we are up against a #whiteSupremacist#cult in November 2024. Millions of #Americans have decided that the #Nazis were right, and their #ideology should reign supreme in the #UnitedStates. This isn't #fearmongering. This is the #reality we are facing. Voting Blue is the only hope we have of preserving our #republic. If we fail, we'll never again have another opportunity to #vote.
#Fascism isn’t an ancient relic or an outdated term; it has returned as a living, breathing process transforming and weaponizing the state against its people.
Few remain from the generation that watched the #ideology take hold and mutate and unfold its horrors the first time, and without that living memory, we are challenged to explain what fascism was and how it worked.
Zelenskyy straight-up said Ukraine is going to lose if Congress doesn't send more aid (www.businessinsider.com)