Happy May 1

…a proper post will follow.

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What Happens in Brussels

…is exactly nothing at all. Years of pervasive surveillance have failed to predict the location of (let alone prevent) a single terrorist attack, and so it shall always be. If something happens in Brussels, it will be after the hysteria blows off; in the meanwhile, islamists have attacked Bamako, resulting in this entertaining piece that tries to explain the facts, as well as where Mali might be, to the English public.

Update (7/12/2015): as Brussels no longer is in a state of emergency (also not to disturb the pre-christmas consumer orgy), absolutely nothing has happened there, albeit there was a shooting in California, which, as usual, hit the NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, and so forth as a ton of bricks. But, hey, if you download a film illegally, you’re in serious trouble, punk.

Paris past the Bullshit

So, ISIL (most likely) has killed 129 (so far) in Paris. Conservative newspapers are ranting about the end of Western Civilization, governments are thinking of putting more attention into reading your email, people are committing inane acts of solidarity, like putting the French flag on Facebook, and you are thinking of a friend of your second cousin who goes to Paris once a year and is therefore, most likely, lying in a pool of blood.

The only people who should be happy about this hysteria are ISIL; because, if you look at it objectively, 129 people are very few. ISIL kills twice as many every time it conquers a new village in Syria, which happens several times a week. Every time your government fires a nurse to hire some email-reading spook, it dooms far more people than that to a far more unpleasant death. Really, the only way one can achieve anything by killing 129 people is if the media blow them out of proportion and people start having their face in three colours on Facebook. And the only way you can fight terrorism is by thinking rationally. Rational thought will tell you that, yes, you have a high chance of being killed by an islamic fundamentalist in Paris; but this is not if you stroll downtown and happen to be involved in a shooting that happens once a year; it is if you stray too far from downtown and end up in the enormous, atrocious banlieu, the suburbs of Paris that the French government, with no other purpose than an idiotic celebration of its colonial past, has filled with unintegrated immigrants from North Africa, and where crime and fundamentalism walk side by side. Which, incidentally, means that, if France closes its borders, it is the rest of Europe that is safer.

Anyhow, if you stick to downtown, that is, if you have money enough, don’t worry: you’ll be able to enjoy that world of laicité, grands écoles, cognac and threesomes that ISIL hates so much (and please, don’t tell me you believe it is because France is actually doing something to hurt them in Syria) for a while still: santé.

Update (16/11/2015): as a Kurdish counter-offensive has taken back Sinjar, graves of 128 Yazidi killed by ISIL have been found; Facebook offers no Iraqi flag option, conservative newspapers fail to rant while France, and your cousin, don’t really give a shit.

Happy Anniversary, Comrades

Staunch communists like me, of course, will know that today is the anniversary of the October Revolution (the “October” part is a misnomer due to the use of a different calendar). For the others, here is an old poster whose original yours truly owns, by a freak accident of fate.

An old-school Soviet soldier about to slay the Dragon of Capitalism; after the drawing was made, however, the soldier rode along, and the dragon went away to a 83-years course about how to devour people more efficiently

Vous n’êtes pas Charlie

A while ago, I pointed out that there is no such thing as Islamosocialism. My conservative readers (which are the majority, and are probably looking for hints at when the revolution is coming to them or something of the kind) kept their smug smile. My leftist readers kept eating their kebab and feeling very conciliatory.
Two and a half years laters, matters have come to head: socialists, not the clamouring fascists, have violated the self-imposed censorship that has, for the past 14 years or so, effectively kept all Western media respecting Islamic law, and have ended up being killed.

At this point, both conservatives, whose smile has become even smugger, as they are moving to appropriate the moment and leftists, who really don’t want to give up their kebabs, have found a way of showing “solidarity”, the idiotic “Je suis Charlie” flag:

Why is this idiotic? The Charlie Hebdo people exposed themselves to danger by being provocative; to show that there is no point in respecting anybody’s imaginary friend. There is nothing provocative in this flag; being Charlie means showing courage to change society. Showing this flag does nothing of the kind. If you want to be Charlie, show this:

and watch your back.

Update (18/7/2015): with the kind of contrived bullshit your girlfriend will give you when she dumps you for being unemployed, the editor of Charlie Hebdo has finally admitted that he doesn’t like the idea of being shot, and promised never to publish Muhammad cartoons anymore. In French, Charlie n’est pas Charlie non plus.

A Reminder to My Associates

About a month and a half ago (but the corpses have only been discovered now), 43 Mexican students, basically for no other fault than having leftist sympathies, were arrested by the police, handed to a drug syndicate, tortured and burned–some of them alive. I had to interrupt my silence to point this out, because I am a sort of political scavenger, taking up minor, unimportant causes; I leave the really important ones to to my honoured co-fighters in the European Left. Among those (and I only touch the really important subjects here), we can count:
– A woman with a tight shirt, walking for 10 hours in Manhattan was addressed almost half a dozen times as “Hey, beautiful”.
– The length of paternity leave in Denmark is not quite as long as in Sweden.
– Not enough people calling the woman of point 1 “beautiful” were white, which questions the fact that it happened at all, as several of my honoured co-fighters had decided that they just had to be.
Important stuff, people, important stuff. Far too important for this blog.

Is Russia Imperialist?

Long post. Really long post. But fully worth reading to understand the situation in Ukraine.

A Critique of Crisis Theory

What started out as a small-scale demonstration in Kiev’s Maidan—Independence—Square against the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 has escalated into a crisis that in a worst-case scenario could develop into a full-scale shooting war between Russia and the U.S-EU-NATO world empire—“the Empire” for short. As more facts have came out, it has became clear that the demonstrations had a pro-imperialist, pro-Empire character from the beginning. In addition, it is now obvious that the U.S. government has been heavily involved since the beginning.

The one-sided U.S. media coverage of the “pro-Maidan movement,” as the pro-imperialist forces in Ukraine are called; the activities of U.S.-funded NGOs; and the U.S. role in the pro-imperialist “Orange Revolution” of 2004 all point in the same direction. In addition, as the crisis developed it was revealed on the Internet that U.S. diplomats favored right-wing neo-liberal banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats,” as the diplomats affectionately…

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