jwiggler

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.

There are a lot of weird cringey exchanges in this show similar to this that end up being stylized writing to trick or subvert the viewer. You should continue watching

I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.

I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.

Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.

The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.

Mainstream media is generally propaganda, too, even lots of “left leaning” media.

For example, we don’t hear about the war crimes committed by Ukraine, only ones by Russia.

We don’t hear about how the US was actively working with right-wing groups in Ukraine to overthrow the government in 2014, efforts that helped further fracture relationship between Ukraine and Russia.

Or the military posturing by NATO in a geographically adjacent country to Russia.

War makes us forget nuance and accept simple absolute truths like Russia attacked Ukraine and therefore Ukraine must defend itself.

And for the record: fuck Russia for this ongoing conflict. They are the perpetrators, for sure. But all historical context to this conflict is completely thrown out in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Where are the anti-war democrats? Where are the people looking to end the war, rather than further fuel it with weapons? Nowhere to be found.

You know why? Because war makes too much money. Americans are paying to subsidize the cost of weapons to keep the war going. We the people are funding this.

We say “what are we supposed to do? Just let Russia invade Ukraine?” And then turn a blind eye to Palestinians occupied by Israel.