#militarism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #militarism, aggregated by home.social.
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A Society of Discontents
Their purpose is to create a hole within you that never gets filled up.
The latest version of the newest model of the most recent rendition of the smartphone, TV, tablet, computer, or gadget is one that you cannot live without.
That is what they tell you.
The snap crackle pop of the latest pop music crackles with the static of love without commitment, fame without responsibility, an endless party while the world burns, shadow puppets on the stage.
Buy what I am selling, they say.
My house is bigger than yours. My tummy and butt are tighter. My penis is larger. My breasts are perfect. I have the face of a goddess. I am the perfect lover. I do not have ED or PE. My children are prodigies. My car is shiny. My vacations are dreamy. My investments are sound. I am more than financially secure. I am the Joneses times a million.
You can keep up, they say.
How dare anyone threaten this lifestyle? Missiles, drones, ships, jets, weapons of mass destruction, bombs smart and dumb, they can always come up with a reason, something or someone to fear, to launch destruction.
Aren’t you a patriot? They ask.
Fill it up. Take a long swig. Stuff your face, your pockets, your house, your shopping cart and grocery bags, with as much as it, they, you can hold.
Funny how it is never enough.
September 13, 2014
#Advertising #bodyImage #celebrityCulture #Comparison #consumerCulture #Consumerism #Contentment #culturalCritique #Discontent #eerieImage #emptiness #endlessDesire #envy #excess #falsePromises #fearAndControl #Greed #hollowSelf #longing #Materialism #mediaSaturation #militarism #neverEnough #Patriotism #POETICAORAREContemplativePoetryPrayers #SmartPhone #socialCritique #spectacle #SpiritualHunger #statusAnxiety #technologyAddiction #toxicCulture #warEconomy -
The tech oligarchs’ world-abandoning project
* "Most people have the capacity for awe, to gasp at the jeweled beauty of a songbird or the otherworldliness of a whale’s exhalation or the intricate latticework of an ancient holy site. Children have the capacity for pure awe; so do 90-year-old actors in suborbital space. To experience awe is to dissolve into the swirl of the universe, to feel small in the best way. This sense of interconnection is also why we grieve when we witness strangers suffering, and feel the great sorrow of extinction. The fact that this capacity seems to be missing from the men who hold our collective fate in their hands is a personal loss for them – and an existential crisis for the rest of us."
"We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. There is something treasonous in this. Treasonous not to an abstraction like a flag or a nation, for we are not nationalists. But treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/13/end-times-fascists-essay* End Times Fascism
And the Fight for the Living World, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor >>
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621384/endtimesfascism/
#earthbound #home #biodiversity #fascism #SpaceColonisation #SettlerCulture #frontier #violence #BigTech #militarism #FarRight #OrganisedAbandonment #ClimateBreakdown #WorldAbandoningProject #OuterSpace #life #habitability #books -
"The US Air Force had sent the Rivet Joint, one of the world’s most powerful surveillance aircraft, to gather intelligence before a hostile operation. The UK also owns three of the planes and last month dispatched one to the North Atlantic to support the seizure of the Marinera tanker, which the US said had transported sanctioned oil for Venezuela.
Equipped with cutting-edge military technology, the Rivet Joint can pick up radar signals, geolocate enemy systems and intercept communications from 150 miles away.
Exactly how it does this is kept strictly under wraps. But we can reveal that an Australian tech company called Appen has performed work for a secretive US military unit, code-named Big Safari, that installs the planes’ tech systems.
Appen recruits gig workers from all over the world to help train AI systems. The company’s latest annual report says it has a workforce of a million people who speak over 500 languages.
Many of these gig workers are paid very little. Some are from countries that have faced attacks from US armed forces. None were told by Appen that they may have been working for the US military."
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"Special forces are both part of the state and deliberately unbound from many of its rules. This ambiguity is useful but at scale it poses nagging questions of accountability and resources. How to pay for regular, standing armies was, after all, the question that historically gave rise to parliaments. Who, then, oversees and pays for an irregular war fought off the books? Not for nothing, first the French and then the CIA learned to make the drug lords of the Golden Triangle into the paymasters of their paramilitaries. As the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s and the opium economy of Afghanistan reveal, America’s secret state knows a thing or two about narcoterrorism.
The current special forces establishment grew out of an effort to bring military discipline and some degree of Congressional oversight to this murky world. Eagerly supported by a bipartisan consensus, the special forces are today more lethal than ever and, though covert, also the most visible and culturally “relevant” branch of the US military. Images of muscle-bound Navy Seals and Delta Force make endless fodder for Hollywood, social media and computer games. The paramilitary antics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bear their cultural imprint.
Of course, the fact that the US maintains a special forces establishment the size of the British Army does not by itself explain any given operation. But what it should rule out is pearl-clutching. Far from being unthinkable, what the Trump administration did in Venezuela has been imagined over and over again. And, as for the legality, international law has always been entwined with the chosen tools of liberal warfare — sanctions, blockade and punitive special operations. If gun-toting special operators appear as a modern Frankenstein, this is our monster."
https://www.ft.com/content/a269a24a-04ea-4166-a978-bee35f094f08
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Quoting Iris Hefetz:
As part of the “new chapter” in its history, #Germany has become a kind of #Jewish shtetl. Descendants of #Nazis adopt Jewish symbols, worship #Zionism and persecute Jews who criticize Israel – in the name of fighting #antisemitism, of course.
Hefetz describes how Germany has undergone what she calls “convertion to Zionism,” that is the transformion of descendants of Nazis into “the new Jews.” But she starts with a joke she heard from a Jewish child in #Berlin:
“What’s the difference between Jews and Muslims? The Jews are already past that.”
Muslims have become the new target for traditional German racism and intolerance. She contrasts today’s Germany with the country she found 23 years ago:
“Germany 23 years ago was truly a different Germany. It was still an anti-militaristic and anti-nationalist society and state, which respected its constitution and international law to some extent, where a million people marched against the horrific and internationally illegal war by the US in Iraq, which Germany refused to participate in.”
She traces this transformation back to Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who stated: “We caused the Jews such great injustice, we committed such terrible crimes against them, that there was a need to atone for them or repair them to some extent, if we wanted to regain honor among the nations of the world.” However, Adenauer’s antisemitic reasoning was revealed when he added: “The power of the Jews – even today, especially in America – should not be underestimated. Therefore, I consciously and carefully invested my entire being, to the best of my ability, to bring about reconciliation between the German people and the Jewish people.”
Hefetz says that Germans have now collectively “converted to Zionism” without the need for actual conversion:
“An entire wing of the German ‘left’ consists of men who ‘engaged in identity searching’ and found it in the form of Israel. They sound as if Noa Tishby is speaking from their throats, wrapping themselves in Israeli flags and IDF flags, going to see folk dance performances celebrating diplomatic relations between the states, and saving Jews from ‘antisemitism.’”
She explains that “according to data published in the Israeli magazine in Berlin, ‘Spitz,’ in an article later removed, more than half of the complaints about antisemitic incidents in Germany are by German Christians with Nazi grandparents, who are attacked by Jews demonstrating against Israel, for example.” The irony, she notes, is that “descendants and great-grandchildren of Nazis are very sensitive to ‘antisemitic attacks against them,’ especially if they come from Jews and Israelis.”
Hefetz describes Germany’s creation of an artificial Jewish identity: “Germany has become a kind of Jewish shtetl. There is no place in the world where you can hear more #klezmer music (traditional Eastern European Jewish music) , adapted to the German ear. The popular names in recent decades in Germany are Hebrew Jewish names.” She explains how “the German state began funding Reform conversion of Christians to Judaism, and recreated the destroyed German liberal Judaism, a ‘new Judaism’ that is of course more desirable than the ultra-Orthodox, who are ‘Ostjuden.’”
Note: The original derogatory term #Mizrahim as used by Ashkenazi Jews, referred to Jews of Eastern European heritage. In #Israel this term was then repurposed to describe Arab Jews, mostly, as part of what Aziza Khazzoom described as de-orinetalization of the largest Jewish diaspora, see “How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual” https://www.sup.org/books/sociology/shifting-ethnic-boundaries-and-inequality-israel
Hefetz details how this “Israelization” serves #Germany’s return to #militarism:
“Identification with Israel helps Germany return to being a militaristic state: it helps break the taboo of nationalism; it helps rehabilitate the image of the German man, who in the years after the war tried to be ‘non-German’ by emphasizing soft qualities, non-authoritarian education for children.”
She quotes recent statements by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said Israel “does the dirty work for us” regarding attacks on Iran, while a security expert from his party stated “we are also ready to die for Israel.” She notes the antisemitic nature of these statements:
“These antisemitic statements about Jews doing Germany’s ‘dirty work’ are not new, and the reference to killing civilians as ‘dirty work’ recalls Himmler’s Poznan speech, or what Rudolf Hess said at the Nuremberg trials.”
She concludes that “Germany is making a comeback” through authoritarian measures disguised as fighting antisemitism, while “Germany supplies Israel with at least a third of the weapons for the genocide in Gaza.” Despite this official support, Hefetz notes that “there is an absolute majority in the German public that consistently opposes supplying weapons to Israel; and with all the pro-Israeli propaganda and Israeli flags flying over every government office in Germany, 73% think what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide.“
Photo: Iris Hefetz arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest (screenshot)
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🛢️ 🏖️ 📙 I never posted #OilBeach to @bookstodon and while it's been out for over a year now, I am very proud of it and hope it will find its readers!
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo185167017.html#pollution #energy #otters #whales #California #militarism #oil #LosAngeles #Shipping #ports #CounterPort