Blogs

I know, it's been forever since I did one of these, but that's because nothing newsworthy has been happening. The Kurds are continuing to slowly grind through ISIS's capital city of Raqqa, which has turned out to be a very long and difficult fight. The rebels are mostly occupied with fighting against each other. The regime has been slowly clearing ISIS out of the desert in preparation for an eventual assault on Deir-az-Zor. Things are progressing slowly.

Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the separatist People's Republic of Donetsk, has proclaimed the creation of the Republic of Malorussia (Russia Minor) which includes all of Ukraine.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukrainian-separatists-proc...

In 1883, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde, the French Marxists, and accused them of denying the importance of reformist struggles. Marx had become more sympathetic to parliamentary politics as a tool for bettering the condition of workers and began to realize the importance of trade unionism for ameliorating the woes of the proletariat; and had begun the revision of Marxism that would ultimately be completed by Eduard Bernstein.

Today is Bastille Day, la Fête nationale, le 14 juillet and all over the world, various francophones and francophiles will be celebrating all things French, or at least all things that they think are French. As usual, in France itself there will be the traditional military parade, when the French wing of the military-industrial complex puffs up its chest in recognition of its legacy as an imperialist power, its nuclear arsenal, and its membership to the UN Security Council.

We don’t value the future because the world is dominated by an economic system based on creating ever increasing profits irrespective of the human, social and environmental damage that is caused. As the four horsemen of the post-modern apocalypse – increasing population growth, finite resources, increasing greenhouse emissions and an economic system based on creating ever increasing profits irrespective of the costs involved – move from a canter to a gallop, the future looks much bleaker than it needs to be.

Policing is a racist institution, rooted in slavery. The first police forces in America were runaway slave patrols. Later on, police were used to beat down striking workers—to force workers to work, to enslave them. And now the police system is still a runaway slave patrol, that arrests people for victimless crimes and throws them in jail to be slaves in the Prison Industrial Complex, because prison slave labor is a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry! There are no good cops because the institution itself is unjust. "The thing! The thing itself is the abuse!"

Israel's 'right of return' is the same as the White Australia immigration policy.
Jews are given special consideration over non-Jews if they wish to 'return' to their Jewish homeland, even if they are converts to Judaism without ancestral connection to the land.

Now extremist rabbis have taken control, dominating the already morally warped conversation. They have blacklisted any rabbis with a liberal interpretation of the conversion process.

I'm of several minds as to what the regime is likely to do here. First of all, I don't buy the idea that they have 6500 tribal fighters. Their numbers are probably much more limited than that, and I doubt they have the manpower to really properly hold these long front lines. In particular, I suspect that capturing the Rusafah-Palmyra road would be less beneficial than South Front thinks, because the lack of manpower will make the encirclement porous.

I am not an anti-Zionist activist.

One of the more insidious consequences of the neo-liberal deregulation, privatisation, globalisation, corporatisation revolution that has swept the globe over the past 40 years is the human cost of allowing corporations whose primary responsibility is to create ever increasing profits for their major shareholders, to self-regulate.