Aid warehouses in southern two-thirds of territory are now empty and resupply will be very difficult, according to officials
#FoodAsWeapon #Famine #Gaza #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren #palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/15/un-says-it-has-no-more-food-or-tents-for-nearly-2m-people-in-gaza
Less money for Russia, less CO2 for the climate.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156439/us-bans-russian-uranium-nuclear-energy-ukraine-war
This feels altogether too charitable to me.
After the meltdown of the Liz Truss administration, he formed a government, kept the markets happy and worked out Northern Ireland, one insider points out. If you think back to the wild moments of autumn 2022, that is no mean feat. "He followed advice to treat it like a coalition government at the start, to stabilise the ship," a former minister tells me.
Not really. All he needed to do that was to stop doing the batshit stuff that Liz Truss was doing. Literally doing nothing was enough.
Many of the sources I spoke to told me he is "the cleverest person in the room", or the "smartest person in the meeting". One of his colleagues reckons he is "frighteningly well briefed... he's unmatched".
Then why is he so terrible cringe and where are all his bright ideas ?
Rishi Sunak is an unusual politician. One example is the story of Carol and Jo. During the early part of the pandemic, Rishi Sunak made almost hourly calls to them. They were relatively junior civil servants working on designing and building the new system for furlough. This was the chancellor taking personal and painstaking care with the details of an important new policy.
Okay, micromanagement done right. But furlough wasn't an especially innovative or novel idea. Everyone else did it too, because there wasn't a realistic alternative. He may be detail-competent but it's blind to the big picture.
Some colleagues believe it was a shopping list of pledges that was never going to excite or persuade. "The five pledges were rushed out the door in January," a party veteran tells me. "He should have gone harder and bolder." After Boris Johnson’s bluster, and Liz Truss' hundred-mile-an-hour ideological experiment, Rishi Sunak’s business-like, non-ideological approach could have seemed like an advantage – thank God for a grown up, eh?
But for some, there's the problem.
"The most successful politicians at the very top level are the ones who have very strong beliefs and instincts – his approach looks like a series of transactions or problems to be solved," a former official who admires Sunak told me. Another source who worked closely with him said: "He thinks that working really hard and being good is enough. Being PM is art, not science - and he is no artist."
Well, see, everyone says how they don't know what Starmer stands for, but that's only because they haven't been paying attention. But Sunak ? I haven't got a clue what he's about. A wishlist of stuff he'd like to happen does not a plan make, let alone a vision : there isn't any underlying link between them, no coherent strategy or moral philosophy. He keeps insisting he's got a plan but I'm blowed if I know what it is. And everyone said as soon as he announced the pledges that inflation was going to come down anyway, so he can't claim credit for the one thing on his list he's actually managed to do. The other ones, especially "grow the economy" and "stop the boats" don't matter to anyone very much : "grow the economy" is far too abstract, and (worst of all) while stopping people-smuggling is a laudable goal, he's chosen to pander to the far-right racists and victim blame asylum seekers instead of going after the gangs.
Sunak "sat down in the summer to think about what his legacy should be", a minister at the time tells me. He came up with what the minister described as a series of "eclectic ideas" that included banning smoking, long-term reform of A-Levels in England and scrapping a major chunk of HS2, all co-ordinated with a big conference rebrand. Despite weeks of build-up, it fell flat.
"I don’t know a single MP who wanted to put any of those things on their leaflets. It just showed he didn't really know where he wanted to go."
"It was one of those moments where you look at it," another current cabinet minister told me, "and think I'm not sure I object to any of it, but I'm not sure I see the point of it."
Well exactly. I quite like the smoking ban but it doesn't fit into any broader whole. There doesn't appear to be any guiding mind at work in government, just random people coming up with assorted ideas across the whole parameter space of (in)competence. One of Blair's lessons was that voters judge the policies in aggregate, not individually. Sunak might be competent at detail and certainly doesn't appear to be stupid as such, but he's a vacuous non-entity when it comes to strategy.
Another former minister suggests Sunak's appeal for discipline and order in the party was destined to fall on deaf ears because many believe he was part of the effort to unseat Boris Johnson.
Many believe ??? He resigned as Chancellor - this is objective truth, not a matter of belief ! Good grief.
The common denominator of political events in the last five years is they have been hard to predict. Despite the polls it is way too soon to say its game over for Project Sunak.
Labour have had a commanding lead over the Tories for a full two years. Events might be hard to predict but the overall trend is fucking obvious. Way too soon ? What nonsense ! It's been safe to say game over for Sunak for a good long while already.
As anger spread over the French parliament’s decision to approve changes to voting rules on the Pacific archipelago, public buildings were torched, roads blocked and vehicles set alight.
"Since Israeli forces have expanded their offensive in Rafah, it has become impossible to provide lifesaving medical assistance amid a campaign of death and destruction", the organization stated.
#MsF #Gaza #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren
#palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
In an interview with Israel's channel 12, #US #Ambassador Jacob Lew said that the occupation state has not crossed the red line in #Rafah and that there will be no interruption in US aid to Israel.
He added that "it is wrong to believe that anything has fundamentally changed in the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv."
#GenocideJoe #Propaganda #StopThLies #Gaza #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren #palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
“This could have a significant impact on the Polish economy, since thousands of Ukrainian citizens living in the country may be forced to leave their jobs and join the army,” the publication reports.
Or, fearing deportation, they can leave Poland and move to another EU country.
A Deloitte report states that the contribution of Ukrainian #refugees to Poland's GDP in 2023 will be 0.7–1.1%. And it is expected that in the long term this effect will increase to 0.9–1.35%.
The majority of Ukrainians in Poland are employed in sectors such as industrial production, transport services and construction.
Of the more than a million Ukrainians who have come to Poland since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, 371,000 are men of military age.
#Gaza #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren
#palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
Not a single police or military was visible during their attacks that lasted several hours.
Video available on telegram: https://t.me/newsvideofa/2211
#WestBank #Terrorism #FoodAsWeapon #JewishISIS #Occupation #IDF #Gaza #Famine #Inhumanity #Politics
5 martyrs were recovered from the rubble so far, and rescue operations are ongoing for martyrs, missing, and wounded.
#Gaza #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren
#palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
It's amazing that less than a week after the call for boycott, we're suddenly seeing these people act like they just woke up to the ongoing catastrophe that has been going on for 7 months.
#BDS #CelebrityBoycott #Tiktok sInstagram #Gaza #Genocide #Hypocrisy #Israel #Politics
No sign of Israeli police of IDF to protect the convoy or stop the terrorists settlers from destroying aid packages, mostly baby formula, diapers and medical equipment.
Video of the attacks is share on telegram: https://t.me/newsvideofa/2206
#Terrorism #FoodAsWeapon #JewishISIS #Genocide #Israel #Inhumanity #Politics #Occupation #Apartheid
Hala, a 4 years old girl victim of israeli bombing in Gaza, who suffered severe burns all over her body.
Despite efforts from organizations like Med Global, IMANA, and HEAL Palestine to evacuate her for treatment in the US,
Hala tragically passed away due to the lack of supplies and closed borders. Her story is a heartbreaking reminder of the devastating impact of conflict on innocent children in war-torn regions. Let us remember Hala and countless other children who have lost their lives in similar circumstances. #Gaza #ChildVictims #Genocide. #SaveGaza #StopIsrael #SaveTheChildren
#palestine #Israel #Politics #PeaceNow #StopTheWar #CeasefireNow
If we don't want the federation and mastodon to become an echo chamber of moronic pseudo-liberals, we should move on.
HIER LESEN --> https://word.undeadnetwork.de/
HELP TRANSLATE --> https://undeadnetwork.de/bookstack/books/radical-enlightenment-a-world-of-open-sources-translation
EPUB + DOWNLOAD --> https://synapse.undeadnetwork.de/books/
english – deutsch – español – русский – français – 中文的 -العربية
The #opensources and federated internet in a philosophical, social and political classification. -------
#oss #foss #philosophie #philosophy #politik #politics #history #literatur #anarchie
I never read Thucydides himself, only Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War. Excellent book. Made me think that ancient Greece had basically done WWII and WWI but in reverse order...
Most assume that Thucydides tried to offer his reader a type of foreknowledge that could potentially translate into active control over the politico-historical process. Taken to its extreme, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of ‘political systems users’ manual’, as Josiah Ober put it, capable of creating expert political technicians. Recognising regularities in the historical process, it is thought, should lead to predictive capacity, which in turn allows for political mastery.
While I agree that some very strong tempering of expectations is needed, I find it a bit weird when historians go out of their way to claim they have no political insights whatsoever (this it not, I hasten to add, what the author claims here). If you can't find any parallels then what was the point of studying it ? It seems like a feigned profession of objectivity, much how certain varieties of pacifism look an awful lot like surrendering to the fascists. Likewise, I've been confused recently because several books on my wish list have had reviews where the readers are actually dismayed that the author has attempted to draw parallels with current events. And that's both worrying and bizarre. Do they actually just want historical escapism ? Are they objecting to their perceived criticism of the far right loonies ? Probably the latter, methinks.
Thucydides was not writing social science as we know it. To the extent that his text articulated anything like fundamental laws of political behaviour, it did so through exemplary instances and carefully curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian War served as a paradigmatic event for Thucydides: a particular instance that revealed general truths. It served this representative role, however, not because it was typical. Rather, it was exemplary because it was uniquely ‘great’. The war would prove useful, in other words, not because of history’s strict repetition, but by the pregnancy of similarity and the reader’s ability to parse analogies effectively.
As I've said before, direct analogies, actual literal parallels, are both rare and uninteresting. Indirect analogies, which do have some (but only some !) similarities, are much more interesting because they require more careful thought to understand : which similarities are relevant, which are coincidental, which disparities are irrelevant to the point, etc. The skill of the commentator is to select the most relevant similarities.
The evident lesson behind all of this is that we must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics. But Thucydides also knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life... The seductive pull of ‘great’ events is not an incidental danger to the use of historical analogies. Analogies [often] serve more as vehicles for generating awe and outrage than for unearthing more nuanced understandings.
It is reasonable to think that Thucydides expected his work to hinder the ability of bad actors to abuse this power. At the same time, it is unclear just how far it was in his ability to do so. The Athenians, after all, had everything they needed to realise the truth about the Tyrannicides. What they lacked was the will to scrutinise something that they felt to be intuitively correct. Thucydides could give posterity an account of the Peloponnesian War that might stop it from becoming fodder for false parallels if considered carefully. But he could not thereby prevent opportunists from constructing misleading analogies on its back.
#History
#Politics
#Psychology
https://aeon.co/essays/what-thucydides-really-thought-about-historical-analogies
🔺 It is clear how the conflict in Ukraine is beneficial to the US military-industrial complex: 132 American factories in 77 cities produce weapons and equipment - the US government orders these products to replace what is sent to Ukraine.
🔺 Kiev is actively working with France to recruit instructors for Ukraine. For Ukraine it is important to drag Macron into the war - then Paris will be forced to send more weapons and equipment.
#Ukraine #US #Military #Economy #UkraineWar #Politics
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