#france riots today live

[hedgehog-moss]

On the eve of planned nationwide demonstrations, I want to offer an overview of the ways the protests in France are being handled by the government so far (and if what you’ve heard is that this is over a 2 year increase in retirement age, please do take a minute to read this post to get a better idea of the context)

1. In Paris on March 21, a CRS (cop) threw a tear gas grenade in the air towards protesters (they’re supposed to throw them near the ground); the grenade landed and exploded on a protester’s head. (x)

2. Massive use of tear gas at every protest, on this vid from March 17 you can see the Place de la Concorde (largest public square in Paris) drowned in tear gas. (x)

3. In Paris on March 20, video of a CRS with a baton hitting protesters who are cowering against a wall (x)

4. CRS grabbing demonstrators in (illegal) chokeholds and dragging them by the neck (x)

5. In Strasbourg on March 21, police trapped about a hundred protesters in a narrow alleyway and tear gassed them from both ends of the alley so they couldn’t escape; an asthmatic person lost consciousness; people who lived there opened their doors and let the protesters enter their houses to get to safety. (x)

6. In Paris on March 20, a CRS shot a protester with an LBD riot gun (rubber bullets) and shouted at him “Pick up your balls now, fucker” (x) (an allusion to the several instances in recent years of protesters having testicle injuries from LBD guns - and non-protesters too, in 2015 a Muslim teenage boy lost a testicle after being shot by a cop with rubber bullets when he was shooting firecrackers in a park on July 14th / Bastille day). A few seconds later in the video another CRS tells the one who said that “careful there’s a camera”

7. In Paris on March 21, a group of 4 or 5 CRS who were dispersing demonstrators, threw a homeless man to the ground who had been shouting at them (hard to hear what he said, the first sentence is “How can you do this job?”), kicking him in the head while he was down and mocking him when he couldn’t get up, calling him a ‘fatso’ and ‘sack of shit’ (the woman you can hear at the end of the video is yelling at the CRS to help the guy get up and telling them “do you lack humanity to this point?”) (x)

8. That same day Macron gave a speech on TV in which he said “the crowd [= the protesters] has no legitimacy against the people, who express themselves through their elected representatives” even though he passed his reform without a vote from the elected representatives—and considering polls show the vast majority (>70%) of the country is against the reform, the “people” and the “crowd” are one and the same. Today (March 22) he gave another TV speech in which he compared what’s happening in France right now to the January 6 US capitol attack.

9. During today’s speech Macron also said “minimum-wage workers have never seen such an increase in purchasing power” which is a mad thing to say in the middle of a cost of living crisis, and he used the term ‘smicard’ in this sentence— the minimum wage in France is called the SMIC and smicard is a derogatory word for minimum-wage workers. He decried the “extreme, unregulated violence” of protesters but had nothing to say about the unregulated violence of his police forces, and instead stoked the fire with contemptuous language that angers people the day before a planned mass protest.

10. Hundreds of protesters (and even people who weren’t protesting but just nearby) have been arrested and taken into custody in “preventative arrests”; the vast majority were then released due to “absence of an offence.” Here’s a thread by a woman who was arrested in Paris along with 11 other women (one was a 17 year-old girl) for taking part in a peaceful protest. They spent 20 hours all in one cell, were only allowed to go to the toilet if they left the door open, were frisked and had their fingerprints and DNA samples taken. Also, in Nantes on March 14, four young women age 18-20 reported having been sexually assaulted by police during body searches while participating in a student protest.

And a thread by a 19-year-old Black student who spent 48 hours in custody last week along with 4 other people who were arrested in Paris as they were walking down the street. Lots of racist shit in this thread. He had already spent 14 hours in custody after a protest a couple of days before, and ended up being charged for refusing to have his DNA samples taken.

This article in Le Monde from yesterday (it’s in French and unfortunately paywalled) talks about people who took part in last week’s protests having been handcuffed and searched in their underwear then released free of charges the next day; a lawyer comments how this is clearly meant to discourage people from demonstrating. The article also mentions two 15 year old Austrian boys who were on a class trip to Paris and were rounded up with a group of demonstrators, so the Austrian embassy had to intervene. (Journalist mentions sarcastically “We don’t know if these high schoolers’ DNA samples were taken.”)

11. There are videos from various protests of journalists wearing the press armband being threatened, hit, or shoved to the ground by police. In Montpellier yesterday, a journalist took this photo as a CRS was pointing his rubber bullet gun at his head and another was running at him with his baton telling him “I don’t give a fuck about your press card” —the photographer managed to run away. (x)

This is all from the past ten days (and mostly from the past two days) and far from an exhaustive list, there's so much outrageous stuff happening (like the Minister of the Interior lying and saying participating in an undeclared demonstration is illegal, when it’s not) but it gives a good idea of what French democracy looks like under Macron. The above photo says it all really. And thank you to all the people who continue taking part in the protests and strikes.

[mask131]

Some times ago, I posted about the vandalizing of the Wall of the Justs at the Parisian Shoah memorial. The post is here if you are interested, and it got many, many notes, so I thank you very much!

But I hope this post will also get as many notes - because we found the guilty party. We know who did it and... gosh, it sounds like a fucking joke but it is not, and it just proves how complex the situation is, and how dangerous the times we are living are.

If you recalled the obvious guilty party, the first suspects, the ones that seemed to have done that were the so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists that in fact are just antisemitic people disguising their hatred under the pretense of "fighting for Palestine". It is well-known that the pro-Palestinan manifestations, events and representatives in France have all versed at one point or another into very antisemitic comments or actions, and the movement is currently being parasited by antisemitism - ranging from actual antisemites who use "Zionist" as a way to designate all Jews, including French-Jews who never saw Israel in their life ; to people who are taking back antisemitic slogans without knowing they are antisemitic in the first place.

The reason the investigation directly was aimed at them was very simple: the red hands, or red handprints, is a symbol that many pro-Palestine manifestants have been using recently. Which, in itself, sparked a whole new debate - about whether it is an antisemitic symbol or not. Because while for some it is the universal "You have blood on your hands" symbol, for others it refers to the blood of a soldier of Israel on the hands of his murderer, during the second Infifada... And while attacking the Wall of the Justs would have been a new low and a new step for these left-leaning antisemites (because so far they only attacked Jews, now they would attack those that saved Jews and assorted Nazi victims during World War II), it was in line with a new form of radicalization of the movement - see the "Block Out" phenomenon on Internet, a cancel culture aimed at those that did not support enough Palestine... As a personal note I will say: where was all this energy and effort when the it was time to defend the Uyghurs against their wiping out by the Chinese regime? It is still time today, their suffering is still going on... But as a prominent Uyghur activist said (I think it was Rebiya Kadeer, but I do not have my notes with me so I might be mistaken) - people care less about the Uyghurs than Palestinians for one simple reason "Because it isn't Israel that is killing us..." It is China, and as a result nobody really cares...

Anyway, I digress... So while it is known, confirmed and recorded that the so-called "pro-Palestine" activists in France are slowly oscillating and sinking into antisemitism, it isn't actually them who did these red handprints. No, they're not guilty this time.

In fact it is something I talked about when I made my original post: there was another very likely suspect which would have surprised nobody. Neo-Nazis. Because while the pro-Palestinian movement is currently crystallizing in France the entire antisemitism wave that has been on the rise for a decade now among the extreme-left, the extreme-right political groups have also been gaining terran and strength for quite a long time, and now, we have actual neo-Nazi parties very vocal and active today... Due to the ungodly amount of terrorist attacks France had to face, due to the frightening strenghtening of radical and extreme Islam in France, due to the whole endless debates about immigration in France, and due to the hyper-violent civil unrests that are clearly just to cause chaos and nothing else (like the riots following the death of Nahel Merzouk, which clearly were not about the Nahel case and just to cause as much destruction and steal as much things as possible)... Well of course, when these types of problem arise, who gains the upper-hand? The extreme-right.

And so now we have far-right candidates so popular they have a good chance of being elected as the representatives of France, and we have many groups of antisemitic Christian fanatics popping up everywhere, and we have neo-Nazi movements literaly returning like some perverted phoenix from their ashes... As such, it was thought that maybe these red handprints could have been the work of a neo-Nazi movement, who would use the current situation to perform their antisemitic deeds while blaming the extreme-left for it... After all, the two movements have been currently doing the exact same thing. Before the Hamas attack, far-right groups were defacing Jewish cemeteries and soiling Simone Veil's grave with Nazi swastika ; and today far-left activists are "denouncing" Israel by... tagging on Jewish temples drawings mixing the six-point stars with a swastika...

So, you know, the typical horseshoe effect. The two extremes are literaly doing the same things, and as such we have a hard time differentiatng one from another.

But no... Turns out it isn't them either! Turns out... it isn't even French people who did this.

And here's where the dark joke comes... You know who did it? FUCKING RUSSIA OF COURSE!

We forget to so easily that Putin is literaly sending his agents in every friggin' political or social event that goes on in the world right now... And in fact that's the whole point: Putin wants us to be so obsessed with the Israel-Hamas conflict and how Gaza is trapped in it all, so that we forget about how Russia is currently destroying Ukraine.

The investigation found out that the people who painted these red hands were three men that had recently arrived in Paris from Bulgaria... They were staying at an hotel and the very day following their crime, they left France for Belgium (Bruxelles to be precise). Now... You're going to say "So they're just Bulgarians? They're not Russians, nothing proves its Russia". Except for one thing... While yes the involvment of Russia has not been "confirmed", Putin's Russia is not known for its vivid imagination... And they have literaly done the same thing some times ago.

If you recall, I posted about it before... It happened last october. Right after the Hamas attacked the music festival, causing the whole madness we are into today, blue David stars were painted on buildings where Jewish people lived, echoing the dark times of the Nazi Occupation in France... Here is the post I made back in February, and I couldn't guess how far things would go back then... While everybody was getting scared about the return of French antisemitism turned out... It was a group of people from Moldavia that was paid to paint those stars everywhere. Paid by... a pro-Russian, pro-Putin Moldavian businessman, Anatoli Prizenko.

You can read more about this on my old post, but investigation concluded it was indeed an operation where Russian forces used the Moldavians as puppets. All to cause fright and chaos in France. When you consider that Bulgaria, like Moldavia, is unfortunately today one of the "screen-countries" Russia likes to use to shield themselves when doing their dirty chores... Blue stars, red handprints... This is clearly the same thing, done all over again.

And where the "joke" part comes out even more - in the sense of a perverse, venomous, fetid joke part of some putrid dark comedy... Russia has currently been truly harassing France through all sorts of operations, each more outlandish than the next, and yet all working in their own way to cause fear and chaos... More specifically two cases are regularly being brought up.

Case 1: The Doppelgänger operation

In June of 2023, the French authorities warned about what was called the "Doppelgänger operation". A massive campaign of Internet misinformation created by Russia. The purpose was simple: create mirror-websites to the official websites of French information networks, newspapers and TV channels. They were almost identical to the official news outlet of France, to the point many mistook them for the real thing - sometimes the only difference you could spot was in the URL. ".fr" became ".ltd", and ".com" became ".cam".

And all those fake websites shared articles about the Ukrainian-Russian war, articles written purposefully to spread misinformation about Russia. Some claimed that the Ukrainian population were in full distrust of their government and wanted to see it brought down... Others wrote that all the Ukrainian operations were disasters and failures. Some invented fake tragedies and disasters in Russia to try to paint Ukrainians as the villains. And others yet wrote about how the donations of Europe to Ukraine were either wasted by the Ukrainians, or would cause economic crisis in European countries...

Case 2: The bed bugs hysteria

In september of 2023, the discovery of bed bugs on several public places in Paris was shared on social media. Some were discovered in a movie theater, the presence of others was attested in some subway lines... The social media being what they are, it became a hot topic talked about by everybody, shared by everyone - and the facts were exaggerated, and rumors started spreading, and soon an entire mass hysteria started overtaking France. It wasn't just Paris anymore, but all the big cities that were supposedly infested by "bed bugs". People claimed to find them in every public places - every theater, every subway line, every hotel, even in hospitals...

Turns out, there wasn't as much bed bugs as the social media wanted us to believe. It was mostly a sanitary mass panic, echoing the fear caused by the Covid epidemic and fed by the worries about the upcoming Olympic games. And... and also fed by Russia. Investigations revealed that there was a lot of fake accounts, troll accounts and bots created by Russian servers and Russian URLs, and who spent their entire time spreading and sharing bed-bugs articles, writing fake articles twisting the facts, and spamming everybody with news of this mass hysteria..

This is the sore and infuriating conclusion. Remember, everyone, that this isn't just about Israel and Palestine... It isn't just about the Hamas or Netanyahu... And we already knew that, because already in Europe it was clear this wasn't truly about what happened in the Middle-East - it was also about the shadows of antisemitism and the wraith of the Nazi presence, it was about the extreme-left movement spreading from the USA university down to European ones, it became a fight about the Jewish and Muslim populations in Europe rather than in Palestine and Israel - and even more, a political fight between the far-right and the far-left across the continent... But it isn't just about that anymore, because now Putin is in the dance and Russia is gleefully putting oil on the fire in hope it will burn everything... This is a fucked-up chess game with many, many players... That all look the same in the end, somehow, so it becomes hard to identify which one does which move.

But at least we know who painted the blue stars, and who painted the red hands, and who pits the extreme-left against the extreme-right, and is trying to make sure the Jewish people of France are feeling scared in their own country. Putin and what he turned Russia into.

[folkfashion]

I guess I'm on strike, too

Well. Yesterday was my first, strike. It's been a week now and I still refuse to believe it. I've been chased by cops in the street many times, everyday a new riot, fires in the streets. I've been tear gased so much, yesterday I felt my whole skin burning, choking and crying hoping it would only stop. I've seen people being beaten up in front of my eyes, not being able to intervene without getting arrested too. Met wonderful people. A solidarity I've been crying for for years. Seen so many buildings burn on my phone and some in front of my eyes too. It's kinda weird, isn't it ? You see all the pictures and it seems so much more impressive than right in front of your eyes. Today someone lost one. An eye. The president told us someone getting killed could stop the reform. I don't want that. No one does. The violence get much worse by the day. I'm always on the front line and I'm not gonna stop being there. I've been an activist pretty much my whole life, but a scared one only since yesterday. Anyone can get arrested, beaten up now. But we're numerous, faster than the BRAV, faster than the CRS (I know I am, I've outrun them many times now). I know how resilient we can be.

Well. I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. It has nothing to do with the blog. I love you all. The fact that every empire will burn one day is the only thing that gives me hope. If you too are in France, we are living history. May we change our world. Run fast, be strong. Do not trust Le pen, Macron, any of them. Only the people can help eachother now.

[lheautontimoroumenos]

gonna try to keep this quick (sorry i did my best but it's still pretty long), but i feel like people are not aware enough, even in France.

so last week, a 17y old boy was killed in Nanterre (what we call the "banlieue", so in periphery of Paris) by a cop. they made him stop on the side of the road and threatened him violently asking him to open the door. on the video, we can see the cop duo at the driver side window. one of them has his gun drawn to the boy's head. the other one says "shoote le" (shoot him) and the cop with his gun drawn says "jvais te mettre une balle dans la tête" (im gonna put a bullet in your head). the boy whose name is Nahel is logically scared so he speeds away. the cop shoots him in the car, bullet in the thorax and the car hits a wall. Nahel is dead and the video is quickly relayed on twitter to mass outrage.

most left leaning people condemn this and ask for justice, but the media keeps asking them to ask for calm and order (which some do, looking at Roussel) but some don't, which alienates them in the political landscape (the favorite word of the right rn is islamogauchiste aka islamiclefty).

but the right, god the right. first they said Nahel deserved it because he was driving without a license. then it was saying he was a criminal that had already been convicted (the cops leaked a fake criminal record). so not a criminal, but he was an Arab so he would've become one, right? and he should've just obeyed the cops and he would have been ok, that's the behavior of a criminal. I think you get the gist, fascist and fascist adjacent justifications for a cop murdering a boy.

since then, there have been riots in Nanterre and all around France, and the State, Macron (President) and Darmanin (Interior Minister) have sent cops galore. Now, the last time something like this happened was in 2005, when we had less social media and the only pictures and videos we had were from the media (opposed to the riots). Today with Snapchat and Twitter, we can see the pov of the rioters and people are realizing that amidst the anger people feel, they find joy in community, and the vibes in the riots are good and joyful at times (a guy asking another guy to go take a yop for him in the market they're breaking and stealing from comes to mind). They can't say just as easily that they're angry and irrational animal because they see the humanity in the riots (they shouldn't need it but well).

now there is a debate amongst both the rioters and the left who stays mostly outside of it. Are they being useful? breaking and burning the right things? should they go to Paris and take the risk of fighting against cops in streets that they don't know as well as their own? factually, they are mostly burning cars, trash and big companies' shops. But people are choosing to only see the rare schools and libraries being burned downed (who were, for a lot of them already falling down because the State doesn't give money to the periphery). Now, it seems logical to say that burning down your middle school is not going to help against police violence. But it feels like the same people who praise the revolution any chance they get refuse to understand that it comes at a price, with violence and at least a bit of destruction. And the right is using this to discredit the whole movement.

back to fascists. First, the cop "unions" Alliance and UNSA Police published a press release calling the rioters (so mostly Arab and Black people, but also poor white people living in the periphery) "nuisibles" (pest, the word used for animals harming the ecosystem). They wrote that the cops will resist, that they are at war, that they will bring order back. In short they want to kill POC. And they have help. Fascists groups have taken advantage of the situation to walk around blocks during the day and beating up people with bats and at night to illegally arrest rioters before tying them down with zip ties and giving them over to cops. and these people arrested who are sometimes barely older than 18 end up with 18 months of jail for burning trashcans and 10 months for stealing a can of Monster (and those are not suspended sentences).

and while these people end up in jail (thus making it more likely that they will end up with shitty jobs and shitty pensions), Jean Messiha (far-right guy) created a gofundme for the cop and his family that has already gathered more than 1.5 million euros. A cop kills a child and wins the million.

so is it violent? yes of course it couldn't be otherwise. but violence is sometimes necessary, especially when you have to fight back against cops, their fascist friends and the State that allows them to keep existing. The rioters deserve full support, even if the criticism of some of their actions should exist. The danger is for this criticism to overcome our support. It shouldn't. Because if they are alone like they were in 2005, the right and the far-right will take advantage of the situation. Last time Sarkozy was elected and the risk is greater this time, with Les Républicains (the republicans) being basically dead and leaving their spot to Marine Le Pen's fascist party Rassemblement National (national gathering).

so if you're french, don't let the people around you talk shit about the situation. and if you're not, be careful still, fascism is rising and they're not as scared as they were 20 years ago.

[continuations]

Moderation in Social Networks

First Pavel Durov, the co-founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France, in part due to a failure to comply with moderation requests by the French government. Now we have Brazil banning X/Twitter from the country entirely, also claiming a failure to moderate.

How much moderation should there be on social networks? What are the mechanisms for moderation? Who should be liable for what?

The dialog on answering these questions about moderation is broken because the most powerful actors are motivated primarily by their own interests.

Politicians and governments want to gain back control of the narrative. As Martin Gurri analyzed so well in Revolt of the Public, they resent their loss of the ability to shape public opinion. Like many elites they feel that they know what's right and treat the people as a stupid “basket of deplorables.”

Platform owners want to control the user experience to maximize profits. They want to be protected from liability and fail to acknowledge the extraordinary impact of features such as trending topics, recommended accounts, and timeline/feed selection on people's lives and on societies.

The dialog is also made hard by a lack of imagination that keeps us trapped in incremental changes. Too many people seem to believe that what we have today is more or less the best we will get. That has us bogged down in a trench war of incremental proposals. Big and bold proposals are quickly dismissed as unrealistic.

Finally the dialog is complicated by deep confusions around freedom of speech. These arise from ignoring, possibly willfully, the reasons for and implications of freedom of speech for individuals and societies.

In keeping with my preference for a first principles approach I am going to start with the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech and then propose and evaluate concrete regulatory ideas based on those.

We can approach freedom of speech as a fundamental human right. I am human, I have a voice, therefore I have a right to speak.

We can also approach freedom of speech as an instrument for progress. Incumbents in power, whether companies, governments, or religions, don’t like change. Censoring speech keeps new ideas down. The result of suppressed speech is stasis, which ultimately results in decline  because there are always problems that need to be solved (such as being in a low energy trap).

But both approaches also imply some limits to free speech. 

You cannot use your right to speech to take away the human rights of someone else, for example by calling for their murder.

Society must avoid chaos, such as runaway criminality, massive riots, or in the extreme civil war. Chaos also impedes progress because it destroys the physical, social, and intellectual means of progress (from eroding trust to damaging physical infrastructure).

With these underpinnings we are looking for policies on moderation in social networks that honor a fundamental right but recognize its limitations and help keep society on a path of progress between stasis and chaos. My own proposals for how to accomplish this are bold because I don’t believe that incremental changes will be sufficient. The following applies to open social networks such as X/Twitter. A semi-closed social network such as Telegram where most of the activity takes place in invite-only groups poses additional challenges (I plan to write about this in a follow-up post).

First, banning human network participants entirely should be hard for a network operator and even for government. This follows from the fundamental human rights perspective. It is the modern version of ostracism, but unlike banishing someone from a single city it potentially excludes them from a global discourse. Banning a human user should either require a court order or be the result of a “Community Notes” type system (obviously to make this possible we need some kind of “proof of humanity” system which we will need in any case for lots of other things, such as online government services, and a “proof of citizenship” could be a good start on this – if properly implemented this will support pseudonymous accounts).

Second, networks must provide extensive tools for facilitating moderation by participants. This includes providing full API access to allow third party clients, support for account identity and post authorship assertions through digital signatures to minimize impersonation, and implement at least one “Community Notes” like system for attaching information to content. All of this is to enable as much decentralized avoidance of chaos, starting with maintaining a high level of trust in the source and quality of content.

Third, clients must not display content if that content has been found to violate a law either through a “Community Notes” process or by a court. This should also allow for injunctive relief if that has been ordered by a court. Clients must, however, display a placeholder where that content would have been, with a link to the reason (ideally the decision) on the basis of which it was removed. This will show the extent to which court-ordered content removal is taking place.

What about liability? Social networks and third-party clients that meet the above criteria should not be liable for the content of posts. Neither government nor participants should be able to sue a compliant operator over content.

Social networks should, however, be liable for their owned and operated recommender algorithms, such as trending topics, recommended accounts, algorithmic feeds, etc. Until recently social networks were successfully claiming in court that their algorithms are covered by Section 230, which I believe was an overly broad reading of the law. It is interesting to see that a court just decided that TikTok is liable for suggestions surfaced by its algorithm to a young girl that resulted in her death. I have an idea around viewpoint diversity that should provide a safe harbor and will write about that in a separate post (related to my ideas around an "opposing view" reader and also some of the ways in which Community Notes works).

Getting the question of moderation on social networks right is of utmost importance to preserving progress while avoiding chaos. For those who have been following the development of new decentralized social networks, such as Farcaster and Nostr some of the ideas above will look familiar. The US should be a global leader here given our long history of extensive freedom of speech.

[brexiiton]

Ecuador 'in state of war' against drug cartels' terror campaign

Schools and stores are shuttered, people are staying home as soldiers roam the streets of Ecuador's biggest cities.

Members of Ecuador's armed forces patrol a street during a security operation in the capital, Quito. [AFP]

With city streets largely deserted apart from a massive military deployment, Ecuador found itself in a "state of war" as drug cartels waged a brutal campaign of kidnappings and attacks in response to a government crackdown.

Hundreds of soldiers patrolled the capital, Quito, where residents were gripped by fear over a surge in violence that has also prompted alarm abroad.

The small South American country has been plunged into crisis after years of increasing control by transnational cartels that use its ports to ship cocaine to the United States and Europe.

The latest outburst of violence was sparked by the discovery on sunday of the prison escape of one of the country's most powerful narco bosses, Jose Adolfo Macias, known by the alias "Fito".

On Monday, President Daniel Noboa imposed a state of emergency and nighttime curfew, but the gangs hit back with declaration of "war" - threatening to execute civilians and security forces.

They also instigated numerous prison riots, set off explosions in public places and waged attacks in which at least 14 people have been killed.

More than 100 prison guards and administrative staff have been taken hostage, the prisons authority said.

In the port city of Guayaquil, attackers wearing balaclavas stormed a state-owned TV station on Tuesday, briefly taking several journalists and staff members hostage and firing shots in dramatic scenes broadcast live before police arrived.

Local media reported some of the attackers were as young as 16.

This attack, in particular, spread panic among the general population, many of whom left work and closed shops to return to the safety of their homes.

"Today we are not safe, anything can happen," said Luis Chiligano, a 53-year-old security guard in Quito who explained he was opting to hide rather than confront "the criminals, who are better armed".

Noboa said on Wednesday that the country was now in a "state of war," as he promised not to yield to the gangs.

Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa gave orders on Tuesday to 'neutralise' the criminal gangs after gunmen stormed and opened fire in a TV studio, as bandits threatened random executions. [AFP]

Gangs declared war on the government after Noboa announced a state of emergency following the prison escape pm January 7 of one of Ecuador's most powerful narco bosses. [AFP]

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was 'very much alarmed by the deteriorating situation in the country as well as its disruptive impact on the lives of Ecuadorans,' according to his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. [AFP]

Peru declared a state of emergency on its border with Ecuador, sending an additional 500 police and soldiers to secure the frontier. [AFP]

China's embassy and consulates in Ecuador suspended services to the public, while France and Russia advised citizens against travel to the country. [AFP]

Brian Nichols, the top US diplomat for Latin America, said Washington was 'extremely concerned,' pledging to provide assistance and 'remain in close contact' with Noboa's team [AFP]

Colombia's army also announced it was bolstering border security. [AFP]

Ecuador's murder rate quadrupled from 2018 to 2022 and last year was the worst yet, with 7,800 murders in a population of about 17 million, and a record 220 tonnes of drugs seized. [AFP]

[scotianostra]

On June 22nd 1725 the Malt Riots, took place in Glasgow.

The Malt Riots led to fatal shots being fired in Glasgow with unrest rippling through the streets of the land, from Elgin to Dundee and Stirling in the summer of 1725.

Scotland became “virtually ungovernable” as the riots spread but the unrest came with perhaps an unlikely consequence – the dawning of a new age of the legal Scotch whisky industry.

Protest flared, both among the people and politicians, when Westminster wanted to extend a tax on malt bushels to Scotland. It had been paid in England to help fund the wars against France with the 1707 Treaty of Union at first exempting Scotland from the levy.

By 1725, the tax was brought in across Great Britain at a price of 3d a bushel – half of what had been paid in England. The price of everyday goods, including beer - drunk by the gallon as a safer alternative to water – faced a hike and an “explosive, two stage reaction” shook the country, according to historian Christopher A Whatley, author of Scotland and the Union, Then and Now.

It was perhaps Glasgow that felt the full force of the anti-tax riots with the unrest spreading and to the mansion of Duncan Campbell of Shawfield, Glasgow’s first MP at Westminster, who supported the tax.

His home, which sat on the corner of Glassford St and the Trongate, was broken into and ravaged by a mob armed with hatchets and other weapons.

Attempts to control the crowd only served to inflame it with soldiers shooting eight members of the crowd in which “stone-throwing females and butchers were prominent”, Whatley said. A further 18 people were wounded.

The soldiers were forced to flee for their lives and took refuge at Dumbarton Castle with General Wade sending 1,300 troops into Glasgow to restore order with the city living under a military presence. Protests followed over the summer in Ayr, Dundee – where a merchant’s house was sacked – as well as Elgin, Paisley and Stirling.

“The fact is that Scotland had become virtually ungovernable,” Whatley said.

Duncan Campbell was compensated by the City of Glasgow for the damage to his home with £10,000 paid to the MP – around £2.1 million at today’s values – with some of the money raised by selling common land.

With the compensation, Campbell went on to buy Islay and Jura.

Emily Coyle, brand development manager at Glasgow Distillery Companysaid : “Campbell took the compensation to buy Islay and Jura, where he encouraged local farmers to seed extra barley which ignited the production of Scots whisky.”

Following Campbell’s death in 1753, his estate passed on to his grandson Daniel who set up the village of Bowmore. The Bowmore Distillery was founded shortly thereafter and a new era of legal whisky production began with the spirit, arguably, funded by the riot of the people.

[oaks-and-willows]

About the Azerbaijani interference in the Kanaky crisis, as claimed by French government sources:

My ex-gf's dad is a consultant. He asked me a couple years back if I could do some research for him to see if an Azeri claim to an Armenian Orthodox monastery in the then-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region could be made on the basis of old documents in a language today spoken in Azerbaijan but not in Armenia, Udi. It could not but that's beside the point.

Today he asked me if I could put him in contact with Kanak leaders so that they would sign an article he wrote. Said it was urgent. Here's the text.

"Here's the draft article. It would be printed in a uk newspaper

"Reinforcements will arrive massively and immediately and will be deployed to the areas which have escaped our control in recent days... to reconquer all the areas we have lost".

This brutally aggressive statement sounds like something a 19th century colonial slave master might have spat out, his name lost to history.

In fact it was spoken by Louis Le Franc, France's High Commissioner, just yesterday.

And it is precisely this antiquated, jack-booted, colonialist mindset which has led to violence, street riots and a state of emergency on the Oceania archipelago of New Caledonia in recent days.

Le Franc is Paris’s most senior representative in New Caledonia - a 140-strong collection of tiny specks in the Pacific Ocean about 1500km east of Australia, named by Captain James Cook in 1774 and now one of the dwindling number of French overseas territories.

This week’s riots, sparked entirely by Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to impose changes to voting rules to the detriment of the indigenous Kanak people fighting for independence, have also left five people dead.

Macron's plan allows recent French settlers to vote, to the anger of many Kanaks who make up 40% of the population. And it stinks of double-standards from the Elysée Palace.

On the world stage - and especially in the context of the EU - Macron insists he is a champion for democracy and self-rule. Only days ago, as people took to the streets to fight Vladimir Putin’s malign influence in the former Soviet-bloc nation of Georgia he wrote: “Bravo to the Georgian people. France stands by you.”

By contrast, last night he sent 1000 more armed officers to New Caledonia to clamp down on demonstrations triggered by his own affront to democracy in that tiny nation.

You couldn’t make it up.

Meanwhile Macron has also bizarrely launched a broadside against Azerbaijan, a country he accuses of fomenting anti-French tensions in New Caledonia and waging a disinformation campaign.

It's not France's fault you see, it's those sneaky Azerbaijanis.... again, you couldn't make it up.

To this end he has banned Chinese-owned social media service TikTok across the territory - a move one might more usually associate more with unsavoury dictators.

Of course Paris’s anti-Azerbaijan position has nothing to do with an independence battle 17,000km away but much to do with domestic French politics./

Azerbaijan and neighbour Armenia have been locked in a long-standing and unpleasant tit-for-tat confrontation for years. France backs Armenia, largely because somewhere between 500,000 and a million Armenians live in France - the biggest proportion in Paris - and Macron, presumably, would like their vote.

And yes, Azerbaijan flags have been seen alongside Kanak symbols in the New Caledonia capital Nouméa (though the Government in Baku has fiercely denied any link between itself and the archipelago’s separatist movement).

But why wouldn’t they wave those flags? Last year Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023. The meeting saw the creation of the "Baku Initiative Group", whose stated aim is to support "French liberation and anti-colonialist movements".

If you are a New Caledonian committed to the ultimate independence of New Caledonia of course you are going to get behind that.

By contrast France has a grim and bloody history of clinging on to colonialism by force, in both Indo China and Africa.

The First Indo China war which started in 1954 (a prelude to the 1960s Vietnam conflict proper) left more than half a million dead. And the even bloodier Algerian War which France fought against native Algerian separatists between 1954 and 1962 is estimated to have cost 1.5m lives. Rape, torture and other horrific war crimes were commonplace and France imprisoned 2m people in concentration camps - and this less than 10 years after the horrors of Auschwitz had been revealed.

Tunisia, Chad, Niger, Morocco… the list of colonies France was desperate to remain master over is as bloody as it is extensive.

But why does all this matter? Why should the wider world trouble itself with the internal politics of a tiny speck in the Pacific with a national population slightly less than that of Montpellier?

Two words: nickel and China.

New Caledonia is estimated to hold 30% of world’s nickel reserves and nickel is what makes up about half of the batteries powering the planet’s electric vehicles.

Nickel may very well be the new oil.

A recent report by Australia’s science agency CSIRO indicated about five times as much nickel (48,006 kilotonnes) would be needed to meet global demand by 2050.

Nickel-rich countries will be very rich indeed in forthcoming decades.

In truth New Caledonia’s nickel industry is currently in chaos, partly through mismanagement, and partly through French policy which governs exports but it is difficult not to conclude that these problems will be corrected and the tiny dot of New Caledonia will become a significant world player.

The second reason New Caledonia is so important is its physical location - which gives France, and thus NATO, a key foothold in this highly contested area of the Pacific.

Unsurprisingly it is currently being salivated over by China.

Which leaves Macron very nervous and feeling the colonial need to step in and make decisions for the poor colonials who know no better.

In 2024 this of course is nothing but patronising, paternalistic imperialism.

As Denise Fisher, former Australian consul-general to New Caledonian capital Nouméa, said: "Never underestimate our independent Pacific Island friends.

"I've been asked, 'Oh, but you know, isn't it a key problem for Australia that if New Caledonia becomes independent right on your doorstep, you're going to have another Chinese vessel? “Clearly, broadly strategically, it's very important. But the reality is, we have other island neighbours who manage their independent countries, they manage their relationships with China."

What she’s saying is that the people of New Caledonia are grown-up enough to think for themselves and make decisions in THEIR interests.

Isn’t that democracy Mr Macron?"

So I think the interference attempts may not be total BS.

[beardedmrbean]

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer praised his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni on Monday for her efforts in reducing illegal migration, saying his "government of pragmatism" sought new approaches to the hot-button topic.

On his first visit to Italy since his centre-left Labour Party's landslide victory in July, Starmer expressed interest in the immigration policies of far-right leader Meloni -- including plans to operate Italian-run migrant centres in Albania -- and stressed the importance of cross-border cooperation.

"You've made remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes as equals to address the drivers of migration at the source and to tackle the gangs," Starmer told Meloni during a joint press conference in Rome.

"As a result, irregular arrivals to Italy by sea are down 60 percent since 2022," said Starmer, who has vowed to fight illegal migration at home.

His visit, in which he toured a national immigration coordination centre with Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, came a day after the latest migrant shipwreck in the Channel claimed eight lives.

The latest incident brings to 46 the number of people who have died this year trying to reach British shores.

Starmer has rejected the previous Conservative government's plan to expel all undocumented migrants to Rwanda while their asylum claims are examined.

As a former chief prosecutor, he said, he saw the value of cross-border collaboration on fighting terrorism.

"And I've never accepted... that we can't do the same with smuggling gangs," he said.

"And now of course Italy has shown that we can."

In Britain, the perilous cross-Channel journeys that migrants attempt from northern France have posed a fiendishly difficult problem for successive governments.

On Saturday, about 800 people crossed the Channel -- the second-highest figure since the start of the year, according to the UK interior ministry.

'Pragmatism'

Starmer said he had discussed with his Italian counterpart a deal Rome signed with Albania in November to open two Italian-operated centres to house undocumented migrants while their asylum claims are processed.

Asked directly whether he would consider such a plan for Britain, Starmer noted that the centres were not yet operational and "we don't yet know the outcome".

Lower migrant arrivals to Italy were currently due to Meloni's efforts, said Starmer, referring to Italy's deals with Tunisia and Libya where funding is provided in exchange for help stemming the departure of Italy-bound migrants.

"I've always made the argument that preventing people leaving their country in the first place is far better than trying to deal with those that have arrived in any of our countries," he said.

"Today was a return, if you like, to British pragmatism. We are pragmatists first and foremost, when we see a challenge, we discuss with our friends and allies, the different approaches that are being taken," he said.

Under Italy's migrant plan with Albania, migrants with rejected asylum claims will be sent back to their country of origin, whereas those with accepted applications will be granted entry to Italy.

But under the former UK government's Rwanda scheme, migrants sent to the East African nation could never have settled in Britain irrespective of the outcome of their claim.

The two migration centres in Albania were supposed to have opened in early August, but have been delayed, with Meloni saying Monday it was a matter of "a few weeks".

Fewer arriving migrants

Starmer's trip to Italy has already spurred criticism, even within his own party.

Labour MP Kim Johnson told The Guardian it was "disturbing that Starmer is seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government, particularly after the anti-refugee riots and far-right racist terrorism that swept Britain this summer".

Besides the Tunisia deal, Meloni's hard-right government has renewed a controversial deal with the UN-backed Libyan government in Tripoli dating from 2017, in which Rome provides training and funding to the Libyan coastguard for help deterring departures of migrants, or returning those already at sea back to Libya.

Migrant arrivals to Italy by sea have dropped markedly, according to the interior ministry.

Between January 1 and September 13, 44,675 people arrived in Italy compared to a figure of 125,806 for the same period in 2023.

Across all the EU borders, meanwhile, the number of migrants crossing has dropped by 39 percent, according to border agency Frontex.

But multiple factors are behind these trends, experts say, with many migrants seeking entry into the EU having changed their route.

Crossings are up 13 percent over the Channel this year, Frontex said.

[mariacallous]

Come the warm, ripening days of summer and I imagine that I am closer to a more ancient, basic and healthful style of vegetable and grain eating than in my cold and meaty winters. I am seduced by my garden and neighboring farm stands vivid with color and flavor.

I avoid a lot of hot time in the kitchen. Much is eaten raw or almost: vegetable soups - gazpacho has many names and many recipes - vegetable sauces for rice or pasty and endless salads. I have corn on the cob and other vegetables in every form: grilled, roasted, steamed, stir-fried, puréed and combined in a variety of stews to be eaten hot, cold and at room temperature. Fresh herbs, garlic, onions and imagination sauce the dishes. The first beans from the pod or dried beans, fruit, cheese, bread and wine complete my menus.

There is almost no meat and little chicken or fish - an occasional grilling, a stew more vegetable than meat, a slice of cold meat or charcuterie, a boiled egg, a little tuna from the can.

I eat this way for pleasure as well as in a modern quest for a more healthful diet. Those came before us ate this way to take advantage of what they had - often limited. While we tend to see a cornucopia-vision of the past, rich in more seasonal, more natural foods, it is only partly true.

Winter in most climates was short of fresh vegetables, and the world relied on salting, pickling, drying and cold storage for any vegetables at all. The animal protein we are fending off today was in short, expensive supply.

With the best will in the world and without an evil intention, food writers and the natural inclination of all of us to glamorize the past and the far away have been guilty of distorting our view of the way the world eats. By selecting the best, the most festive food of other places or times, we have come to see them as halcyon visions of plenty, filled with meat and seafood, sugar and cream.

It is not sugarplum fairies, but roasts and fries, sausages and sautés, stews and cassoulets that frolic in our Rabelaisian dreams. Southern picnics are enriched with baked hams and fried chicken. Clambakes clutter the shores of a mythical New England. In that world of the imagination, native Africans are awash in chicken and ground-nut stew, native Americans feast on venison and buffalo, Greeks expand over countless dishes of succulent lamb, the Chinese are exquisite in damask while dining on unimaginably choice viands.

The English eat hearty roasts, silken salmon, and mountains of oysters. The French of the mind are various, either robust peasants glorying in rich stews or jeweled aristocrats whose famous chefs set forth succulent sauces. Our Italians live in a world of perpetual holidays, their risotti topped with pungent white truffles.

While not totally untrue - these foods did exist in each of these countries and were eaten by the natives at least upon occasion - such visions falsify the totality of real experience and may contribute to the glut of fat and cholesterol in our lives. We equate these festive foods with good living and think that ,if we can, we should eat this way all the time.

Our ancestors and many peoples all over the world today eat very differently from this skewed perception. Carbohydrate, or stodge, was what really fed and filled up most people. With bread as the staff of life in Europe, scarcity led to bread riots for centuries. Even in the recent past, when the government-fixed price of bread was raised in France, the announcement was carefully scheduled for August when almost all Frenchmen are on vacation.

Certainly, the staple food of the vast majority of the world is still rice, followed by bread and potatoes along with noodles - pasta among them - soy foods, yams, taro, yucca, corn, beans, pulses such as lentils, myriad grains and other starchy foods with names foreign to me. In the past and in much of the present, animal protein, when available, has been primarily a flavoring.

Beasts were not killed promiscuously. They were the cash crops and the providers of the milk and eggs. If a pig was slaughtered in the fall, that was a major event, and a family would hoard the preserved hams for Christmas and Easter, or sliver small amounts for a taste at many meals. A prosciutto bone or other ham bone was an asset to be used and reused in soups until flavorless. Fresh meats were rare; only the overage animal or the single, religiously festive springling was sacrificed.

To envisage a chicken in every pot was to dream of luxury indeed - the most luxurious of Sunday dinners.

if other meats were salted and smoked like bacon, or pickled like corned beef, air-dried like grisson or jerky, or preserved in fat like confit, it was to keep them over the winter and dispense them parsimoniously as special treats.

So when we read recipes for peasant dishes crammed with meat, we should remember we are reading about rare treats, not daily fare. Even fishing nations could have uncertain catches, rough seas and months when it was impossible to put out upon the water. Even plenty might need to be sold. A home-cooked paella was mainly rice, seasonings, oil and vegetables.

The great go-along-withs have been vegetables and fruits, fresh when in season, pickled or preserved for inclement times. A little fat would have come from the possibilities of each region - olive oil, butter and lard. Food was about survival and pleasure when possible. No one got more than nutritionally sound share of meat and fat over the course of a year. It is these daily recipes that are by and large missing or recorded primarily as accompanying dishes in our cookbooks and kitchens.

It is up to us to re-create out of our plenty the sane eating and pleasures that scarcity and invention, herb patch and garden, bestowed on our forebears.

"The Real Past", from The Opinionated Palate: Passions and Peeves on Eating and Food by Barbara Kafka

[publius-library]

Why do you think Hamilton supported the Alien and Seduction acts as an immigrant himself?

This is a common discussion I see, and it becomes quite easy to understand when you take into account the current events, what prompted the Alien and Sedition Acts (which is what I will assume you meant instead of Seduction, since I think it would be pretty self explanatory why Hamilton would support Seduction acts), who John Adams was, and Hamilton's beliefs.

Firstly, the most prominent international event occurring at the time was the French Revolution. When the Revolutionary government replaced that of the Ancien Regime, it dissolved it's alliances with foreign nations, especially after they cut their king's head off. This resulted in a war and a dude you might have heard of named Napoleon, but we don't need to get into that to understand that Britain and France had major beef, even more so than before. As a result, a lot of the French people who did not approve of their government's actions, but still did not want to live under a monarchy, immigrated to the United States. Much like today's current debate over immigration, some people believed that the United States were not obligated to give refuge to these immigrants, that they would take American jobs, and posed a risk to American citizens. Hence, the Alien portion of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

As for the Sedition part, this was a personal gift from John Adams to himself. He was a very egotistical, sensitive man who could not take criticism of his policies from the newspapers. As stated by the National Archives, "The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish...any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the government."

John Adams, a Federalist, believed that in putting restrictions on citizenship and free speech, he was preventing American people from sympathizing with the French in the potential war that was brewing between America and France, since France was currently raging and ruining everything and making everything difficult for everyone.

Now, where does Hamilton come in? Hamilton was a Federalist, and while he didn't agree with Adams on almost anything, he was fiercely against any kind of violent rebellion. This is exhibited in the many times he attempted to stop a mob, the earliest one being at King's College, when he stood before a mob and lectured them, buying time for the president of the college to escape being tarred and feathered. This is repeated during the Cadaver Riots in 1788. This belief of his can be traced back to his childhood in the Caribbean, in which there was a constant fear that the overwhelming enslaved population (80% of the island's inhabitants were enslaved Africans) would revolt.

Hamilton was also a fan of Thomas Hobbes, who believed in a cynical idea of human nature, in which every individual is self-serving to their own wants and needs. Hobbes wrote in The Leviathan, "And from hence it comes to pass that, where an invader hath no more to fear than another man's single power, if one plant, sow, build, or possess, a convenient seat others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united to dispossess and deprive him not only of the fruit of his labor but also of his life or liberty." The key differences between the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke also resemble the distinction between Federalists and Democratic Republicans.

All this to say, Hamilton's beliefs were shared with Adams- the French immigrants were possibly dangerous, being a threat to the stable revolution that was surviving in America. Additionally, he followed the principles of Hobbes in his belief that the government was responsible for keeping the people in check, and preventing them from entering into their natural state, which made life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The goal of the Alien and Sedition Acts was to prevent individuals aiming to bring a French-style rebellion to the United States, and to discourage similar sentiments from circulating in the press.

Clearly, this didn't work. The United States never went to war with France, this violation of the right to the press was not tolerated, Adams never served another term as president, and Hamilton never convinced a mob to disperse. The Alien and Sedition Acts weren't entirely anti-immigrant, as they were mainly targeted by the French, and if you're asking me personally, I believe Hamilton was able to disregard this as the law for citizenship (changing the residency requirements from 5 to 14 years) wouldn't apply to him anymore, and he could further hide the fact that he was an immigrant. He was ashamed of his origins, as the Caribbean was used at the time as, essentially, a large prison, and he didn't have the best reputation while he was there. I do think it is ironic that Adams was responsible for the Alien and Sedition Acts, and he was the one who tormented Hamilton for this birthplace. But, you know, I wasn't in that crazy ass redhead's mind.

I know this is long, but I've thought about this before, and I love getting into the reasoning behind Hamilton's politics. He was one of those cases where you can really see how his personal life influenced his political beliefs, and I think that's really interesting. Anyway, I hope this helps, and thank you for the ask <3

[mightyflamethrower]

The Impending Thermidor Reaction in Jacobin America

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would destroy all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice.

The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects.

Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.

Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.

Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.

The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents, deemed guilty of being guilty of something.

By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as 1789—or “year one.”

Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal deity.

The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was worthless.

Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s decapitated.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.

The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate, and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”

A Revolution of the Disingenuous

We are swept up in similarly scary revolutionary times, after the perfect storm of the 2020 rioting, the COVID destructive lockdowns, and a radical socialist takeover of the old Democratic Party.

Decades of successful and legitimate efforts to ensure equality of opportunity, a safety net for the poor, and increased civil liberties have transmogrified into an “equity” agenda, or state-mandated equality of result—or else!

“Diversity” is now an Orwellian word for racial essentialism to the one-drop degree. Jim Crow racism was not eliminated permanently. It now has resurfaced as woke or “good” segregation. Racially separate facilities and events are apparent “reparatory justice.” Black activists are calling for $800 billion in reparations from San Francisco, a city that is melting down as we speak.

The old precivilizational tribalism and monotony of thought are now deemed “diverse.” “Inclusion” means replacing one racial hierarchy of the 1950s with a newer one of the 2020s. Woke leftists prove “inclusive” by excluding as “haters” and “denialists” any who disagree and cannot be easily refuted.

Opportunists Abound

The Nike admen Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James ended up with millions of dollars in endorsements ultimately derived from Communist Chinese exploiters of servile labor—a fact that all their pseudo-revolutionary performance art cannot mask.

Like the rich and elite Montagnards and Jacobins, well-off, degreed suburban grifters suddenly became “woke” arbiters of the “correct.” Thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion czars bloated administrations, broke university budgets, and terrified faculty and employees with their panopticon surveillance. And yet did any of them result in a single better student reader, or at least one more accomplished university math major? Have K-12 scores soared with DEI monitors on hand?

We have not descended to the guillotine yet, but we are getting there with online cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, boycotts, mandatory diversity statements, indoctrination training, ostracism for an incorrect word, and violence redefined as activism.

Black Lives Matter ended when its supposedly Marxist architects all vanished into comfortable bourgeoise estates and cushy retirements—along with the millions of dollars they shook down from guilt-ridden corporations.

#MeToo sputtered out once the mantra of “believe women” turned its attention to candidate Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It turned out that she most certainly must not be believed when she swore the Delaware Democrat had sexually assaulted her.

Supposed transgendered heroes vie for profitable TV endorsement commercials that are as lucrative to them as they are ruinous to their employers.

In our revolutionary times, mediocre biological male athletes “transition” into female sports and suddenly become rich and famous. Women who transition to males, for some reason, find no such profits from male competitions.

A black transient with 42 arrests and three assault convictions is accidentally killed by a would-be Samaritan bystander who takes action to stop his threats on the subway. The tragedy becomes a rallying cry for “activist” leaders, eager for continuous notoriety and profits, while 10,000 black people murdered per year, mostly by other black people, do not earn a snore from these same “civil rights” leaders.

The World Upside Down

Like Revolutionary France, our woke revolution was contrary to human nature and therefore had to be imposed by force or coercion.

Merit is the great enemy of wokeness. One day SAT tests were blind mechanisms to allow the less privileged to compete on the basis of talent rather than parentage. The next day such tests were deemed counterrevolutionary, racist enemies of the people. Universities boast of rejecting 60-70 percent of those who scored perfect on SATs, as if their excellence was proof of their “privilege.”

Jurisprudence was tarred as racist, as if laws against shoplifting, looting, smash-and-grab, car-jacking, and arson were created only by elite white men who never had the need to steal or loot and who therefore made silly, arbitrary laws against them.

Like the Jacobins, our woke elite deem prisons arbitrary detention centers. So thousands of those arrested for committing violent crimes have either never been charged, never convicted, never sentenced, or never incarcerated. These exemptions rest on the principle that the revolutionaries who destroyed the enforcement of law have the wherewithal to protect themselves from the dystopia they created.

Borders disappeared, apparently on grounds they were 19th-century racist relics. Yet sanctuary cities prove the least welcoming of the tens of thousands they all but invited into distant other towns and counties.

The homeless were no longer deemed vagrants, or selfish in their take-over of public spaces, but the victims of an oppressive society.

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection were rebranded as mere lifestyle choices of the unfortunate, not to be judged wrong or unlawful by the victimizers who supposedly made thousands homeless. Ancient laws of hygiene and municipal cleanliness were thrown out as bourgeois, as cities reverted to the protocols of their medieval forebears.

Leftists who created these Frankenstein-like monsters, like the fictive Dr. Frankenstein himself, became targets of their own experiments. It was no longer enough to support civil rights for the transgendered. Suddenly any questioning of the wisdom of biologically born males competing in women’s sports or of teenagers with penises undressing among teenage girls in locker rooms, or of state-sponsored drag-queen shows with children in attendance condemned one as transphobic and worse.

Advocating a secure border and strictly legal immigration was proof of nativism. Equal opportunity for all races was racism. Advocacy for the use of natural gas as a needed transitional fuel indicted one as a climate “denialist.”

As our woke version of the Jacobin revolution accelerated, society itself began to unwind—as expected given America relied on meritocracy, free expression dissent, the rule of law, forbearance, and tolerance.

In less than three years, our major cities became filthy to the point of unhealthiness. Violent crime and thievery drove businesses and commuters away. Subways at night became the domain of the homeless and criminal. Vacancy rates in San Francisco or downtown Portland shot up to 25 percent or more. Millions began leaving Jacobin blue cities and states, and headed for sanctuaries in more suburban and rural red states.

Once-trusted and familiar government agencies became weaponized—and inevitably incompetent. The FBI was not interested in the organizers of 120 days of violent looting, arson, murder, and rioting in summer 2020, or the threatening mobs who showed up at the homes of Supreme Court Justices. Instead, it fixated on parents at school board meetings, Latin Mass Catholics, former Trump Administration officials, and anyone daring to question the Russian collusion or Russian disinformation laptop hoaxes.

The Pentagon brass oversaw a flight from Afghanistan, in the greatest military humiliation in modern American history. Yet at the same time, it focused on rooting out white rage and white privilege despite presenting no data to substantiate its accusations. Former intelligence officers and “authorities” misled the country and warped an election, to ensure Americans did not take seriously the incriminating evidence in Hunter Biden’s laptop of the Biden family’s widespread corruption.

So, the world became topsy-turvy. Throwing a firebomb into a police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting illegally at the Capitol won a decade in prison.

An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city hotel.

The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass. The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

As the American Jacobin phase accelerated, the more it, too, seemed to pursue its own destruction. Few now trust that the graduates of the Ivy League and marquee universities know what they once did. And why not, when students are admitted without test scores, but are assured passing grades, watered-down classes, and graduation to be synonymous with admission?

The U.S. military fell short by thousands of recruits. And why not, when it advertised for manpower with invitations from drag queens, and hounded those as racists who had died at twice their numbers in the population in Afghanistan and Iraq?

A Counterrevolution Is Coming

At peak woke, our reign of terror is beginning to lose momentum because its continuation would erode all the work of 247 years of American progress and sacrifice.

Former and current liberals—an Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Glen Greenwald, Naomi Wolf, or a Richard Dreyfuss—are deemed counterrevolutionaries for questioning the excesses of wokeism, and so began questioning the premises of wokeism itself.

New polls showed scant public support for open borders, for multiple sexual identities, and for biological men competing in women’s sports. Reparations from an insolvent government to black Americans—on the principle that those whose ancestors might have been enslaved eight generations ago were owed money from those whose ancestors might have owned slaves eight generations ago—is widely rejected by the general population.

When corporations like Anheuser-Busch or Disney tried to ingratiate themselves to the woke Jacobins, they lost billions in revenue—just as the woke Pentagon has lost thousands of recruits.

Woke networks like CNN have smaller audiences than some one-person podcasts.

A desperate and woke NBA now brags that its recent playoff televised audience reached over 4 million viewers. A quarter-century ago, when the U.S. population was nearly 60 million smaller, the pre-Jacobin NBA won over 70 million viewers who watched the 1998 finals.

Joe Biden, the thin veneer of the woke revolution, polls below 40 percent. Even that favorability is propped up by the consensus that he has no idea where he is or what he is saying—and thus at least is deserving of 40 percent support for not being responsible for what he has empowered.

A counterrevolution is building, not just because people are angry at what has become of their country, but because they now are learning that if they do nothing, they will have no country—and soon.

[mask131]

A continuation of my previous post, about how in France today the two political extremes offer a sad mirror of racism, with the far-right only wishing to kick out all Black, Muslims and Arabs, and the far-left trying to make people believe Jews and Asians are not minorities, are not discriminated upon, cannot suffer prejudice, and are in fact secret oppressors of the masses...

Because there is a very blatant demonstration of this double-standard established by the extreme-left, which is fascinating in the light of the Israel-Palestine situation today. Two mass-deaths of Muslim people, one man of the far-left, and two very different reactions: today I want to briefly explain to you Jean-Luc Mélenchon's dual view about the Israel attacks on Gaza versus the Uyghurs systematic destruction by China.

I think I said before how France is currently caught between two devils - I'll still recap it briefly. Right now, after Macron, there are two likely candidates to be the next president, the two most popular political figures of the elections today... and they are the faces of the two extremes of the political spectrum. (That's why the current extremism in politics today is called "polarization", everybody goes to the most extreme, no "medium" or "middle" ground is possible anymore).

On one side, Marine Le Pen, who is the face of the extreme-right, and the heir (politically and literaly, since she is her daughter) of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the very living caricature of the extreme-right politician (he collects all the forms of racism, discrimination and -phobe adjectives), to the point his violent excesses caused his party's downfall... But a downfall that was negated due to A) Marine Le Pen's huge "de-diabolization" campaign during which she "de-fanged" her party to "kill the father" (again, metaphorically and literaly) and B) The Le Pen figure growing a second head in the shape of Jordan Bardella, who is also a politician of the extreme-right, but who is hugely popular due to being a young pretty boy who acts as a huge influencer on social media. (Don't even get me started on Eric Zemmour's whole mess)

On the other side, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the embodiment of France's extreme-left. Mélenchon is literaly France's equivalent of Trump - if Trump was on the far-left instead of the far-right. He is this elderly, rich, white guy (which is quite ironic since his ideology is all about defending and promoting young non-white people... and yet they all follow this old white guy who refuses to let anyone else handle his party) ; he is a very rude and vulgar man who keeps insulting everybody he meets ; he encourages a general distrust of the media (that he both regularly uses and regularly disdains in a very open way) ; he encourages his party to rise up and riot whenever there is something that doesn't please him (there were literaly attacks on universities by his voting base when he wasn't elected president last elections), he is a master demagogue AND has an ego the size of a monument (he keeps comparing himself to the Gracchi brothers for example, and keeps using in a very pedantic way the notions of the Roman Republic, from Antiquity you know).

And he does carry with him the whole "Don't like Jews, don't like Asians" baggage of the extreme-left. Mind you, he is careful about it - as he never says anything too openly antisemite, for example, while making sure to not say anything too openly against antisemitism, you see the kind of trickery. But the real proof of the double-standard of the extreme-left, that strongly defends Islam and Arab people and yet considers Asian people (understand Chinese, Japanese, etc) to be "too white", "too rich" and "too powerful" to be a discriminated minority in any sort of way, is the case of the use of the word "genocide" when it comes to Palestine vs the Uyghurs.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been openly on the "pro-Palestine" side of the whole mediatic fight around the Israelo-Palestinian conflict. A bit too much in fact, which is all tied to the many accusations of antisemitism against him - and, as with many very virulent pro-Palestinian mediatic figures, he insists that currently Israel is purposefully causing a genocide in Palestine. Mélenchon being Mélenchon, he is not AT ALL subtle about this - in interviews, he openly says that international organizations and world-groups have recognized a genocide is taking place. When someone points out "Actually, they have opened an investigation for it / There are suspicions of it but no conclusion has been given yet / In truth no official word came out", he immediately slaps back that either the other person is misinformed, either that a suspicion or an investigation by international organization is enough of a proof. It is even more obvious when someone tells him that what is going on is Gaza seems to be more of a set of war crimes than an actual genocide - he insists that it is a genocide, and copiously insults and accuses of all things (from cowardice to racism passing by stupidity) those that refuse to use it in a blunt and non-nuanced way.

Okay... Now what about the Uyghurs?

OH BOY! Do you know what Mélenchon had to say when he was asked about qualifying the inhuman situation of the Uyghurs in China as a "genocide"? He said no. He said no, it is not a genocide, he refused to recognize it as such. We are talking about concentration camps, forced re-education, government-kidnappings, arbitrary arrests, culture-erasure, and suspicions of forced sterilization. Everybody agrees that the situation of the Uyghurs is basically a genocide - and there's none of the complex nuances and troubling factors there are in Gaza today. And yet... he refuses to call it a genocide. Even more hypocrisy on his part: he invoked the fact that international organizations had not called it at the time a "genocide" to defend the fact he himself will not call it a genocide. And even more nauseting... He said - and I quote, that's again a typical Mélenchon style: to call the situation of the Uyghurs a "genocide" would be "dévaloriser" the word "genocide". If I translated this verb, it means "devalue", or "lower the standard". Mélenchon literaly said that calling the situation of the Uyghurs a "genocide" would be "lowering the standard" of a genocide ; and yet he immediately called the situation of the Palestinians a "genocide" despite the international groups and authorities saying one had to be careful about the use of this word.

Why? What is the difference between the two situations? After all, you have the mass-death of a Muslim community in both cases... In both cases you have people confronted by a powerful goverment and crushing state... What is the difference between the Palestinians bombed by Israel and the Uyghurs imprisoned and mutilated by China? Simple! One situation is about Arabs - even better, it is Arab attacked by Jews! Of course the extreme-left would jump on this like a dog on a bone. But the Uyghurs? That's Chinese people, destroyed by the Chinese government. Aka, that's Asians versus Asians. And there, suddenly, oh what a miracle! Suddenly the fact they are Muslims (which is the big credo of Mélenchon, he presents himself as the great defendor of Muslims throughout the world) doesn't matter anymore! "It's Asians bickering with Asians - you can't call it a genocide". Despite the fact that it is a systematic discrimination and ethnic cleansing going on for a long time... But a Jewish nation declares war on an Arab state after a terrorist attacks - immediately it is a "genocide".

I am not here debating whether or not each situation is a genocide - that's not the topic here. Same way I do not want to see anyone in this post trying to pit one situation against the other - both the situations in Palestine and the one of the Uyghurs are awful and abominable in different ways, and trying to make them compete is useless. The point is simply to show how the spokesperson, how the embodiment of the extreme-left, reflects their "Pick and choose your favorite minority" mentality - by only giving all their care and concern to Arab Muslims, and literaly refusing to care for Chinese Muslims...

[narcisseledecadent]

I was talking with some colleagues today at work (I'm a university teacher in a psychology faculty in France) and we came on the topic of the violent riots happening all over France these last few days. We started talking about the fact that we'd need to reform the system or overthrow it and start again and one of my colleague raised a point I thought was interesting.

These last decades in France, the political left (as in "politicians") has been leaning toward preserving the status quo while passing some left leaning reforms and the people (as in "everyday people") have been wishing for blood and revolution, striking and rioting (I know, not all of them). And my colleague told me that there was a time, during France's occupation when the left had to plan for the future. Sure we needed people to sabotage, fight and act, but a portion of the left also planned for the future and what comes after.

And, you know? That's what I miss. The planning, the thinking of "when it's all done, how do we rebuild? How do we help the people who need the system to live?"

Direct action is all good and well, but for change to be achieved, we must also think of what happens after it.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Calva Louise Interview: Closer to Free

Jess Allanic of Calva Louise

BY JORDAN MAINZER

At the last festival they played before Riot Fest, UK-based rock band Calva Louise were met with a bit of confusion and perhaps a little skepticism. "We're British," they purportedly joked to the crowd, following with a half-hearted, "Innit?" Lead vocalist and guitarist Jess Allanic is from Venezuela, bassist Alizon Taho from France, and drummer Ben Parker from New Zealand, so the seaside town of Blackpool, England, on the Irish Sea coast, is the band's adopted home after "squatting" around London when they formed seven years ago. At the festival, whose lineup skewed folkier, they received more rapturous applause from the metalhead crew than the crowd themselves. "We felt like Marty McFly in the 50s," Allanic told me over a Zoom call earlier this month. "'I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet...but your kids are gonna love it.'" At Riot Fest, on the other hand, the crowd, showing up at the Roots Stage at 12:15 PM, was both ready for and loved the band's hook-laden pop-metal.

Ben Parker of Calva Louise

Calva Louise have gone through a few shifts before arriving where they are now. I first heard them on their pop rock, clean vocal-laden debut, 2019's Rhinoceros, released on Modern Sky UK. The album didn't do as well as the label had hoped, so the band was dropped. 300 Entertainment picked them up next for their sophomore record Euphoric, which featured the more aggressive sound with screamed vocals the band is known for today on songs like "Belicoso". But that label didn't work out either. Calva Louise views their struggles as a blessing in disguise. Now, they self-release, free to take their burgeoning aesthetic in any way they please, learning music and video programs themselves to fulfill their ambitious artistic visions. This year, the band has released four singles, the sneakily thumping "Third Class Citizen", melodic but industrial "Feast Is Over", tempo-hopping "Oportunista", and earlier this month, the dramatic "Square One", each with its own visual-universe-building video. (The songs will appear on an upcoming mixtape, now set for release in December.) Even their live shows are, for lack of a better term, DIY. For instance, when Allanic started recording more intricate piano parts in songs but didn't want to rely on such an inflexible instrument live, Taho bought wood and metal and built her a sliding keyboard so she doesn't have to move from her microphone stand. "I'm not very coordinated when I walk in general," she joked, "So running from one place to another to play a part, I'm gonna fall."

Allanic next to the sliding keyboard Alizon Taho built

At Riot Fest, the band certainly showcased their coordination--at least on their own instruments. Allanic's vocal control, from whisper to scream, on "Third Class Citizen" perfectly meshed with the song's rhythmic barrage and chiming keys. Her fast-picking and Parker's trapdoor stop-starts on "Oportunista" recalled the best of one of the day's later bands, Code Orange. Though they still needed to rely on pre-recorded backing vocals to play songs like "Square One", the band is surely but slowly finding ways to become more efficient with the resources they do have, all the while building in momentum to hopefully allow them some future financial flexibility. "We don't do things for show," Allanic said. "We try to do things that will help us put [out] a clearer image of what we want to express. We don't know how to communicate it yet, because we're just three people and the money is an issue." Calva Louise recently received a grant, which will help and on which they recognize they'll increasingly need to rely as an independent band. And they're even open to being signed again to a label--that is, as long as they're finally given the creative control that every artist deserves.

Read my conversation with the band below, edited for length and clarity.

Alizon Taho of Calva Louise

Since I Left You: Have you been using your live shows to road test the songs you've been writing?

Jess Allanic: When we finish the song, I go through all the possibilities on Logic. Alizon and Ben go over their parts until we figure out the best it can be. We have to rehearse every day to be able to play it physically. If we had more resources and didn't have to work, we'd just be rehearsing 10 hours a day until the song is ready. The gigs really help. 6 months ago, we started playing these songs, and now, we have to think about things like, "Where do I take the mic on stage?" or "When do I breathe?" It's like we have to have a musical director. Gigs are like the experiment, playing the songs constantly and figuring out what we have to change. [For instance,] we'll even change some drum parts [as a result of playing live] and rerecord them. The first time we ever played "Third Class Citizen" live, we knew it was good, but I wore a corset on stage and realized I couldn't breathe the whole song. [laughs] Someone recorded it and put it on YouTube, and it's just me out of breath.

Alizon Taho: There are definitely things playing live teaches you that nothing else can.

SILY: You've been releasing videos alongside the new songs. How important is your visual identity, especially live?

AT: The project is not just music. It's a whole multi-disciplinary project from comic book to the videos Jess makes. It's a big story. The visuals, it's super important they convey that story and make everything link together.

JA: It's hard with the means we have--the availability of gear and computers and knowledge of programs--to get to a level where you make people understand what's happening. We spend a lot of time learning how to do things. Alizon has spent so many hours learning how to program a live rig he built himself. We're really lucky we live in a day and age where technology is available to people like us and we don't have to go through university to study programs that cost a lot. You can get so much out of an online course for $100.

AT: We're still experimenting, too.

JA: How can we DIY something that could cost so much money? How can we trick the system?

AT: The live shows, especially headlining sets, we want it to be more than three people on stage playing music. An actual full visual experience. Every time we've gone on tour, we've tried new things, with projected videos Jess made, DIY lights. I think we're getting better.

SILY: You recently got a grant from The FAC, too.

AT: That will be even more helpful for the videos. You have to make every little detail yourself, otherwise. Now, we can buy some assets.

JA: There was a grant we were applying for for years but never got it. When we did the first video for "Third Class Citizen", we were at the limit. I was really hoping to get some grants because we weren't going to be able to do any more videos. It's such a relief. [Now,] we're hiring a studio.

AT: Usually, it's a green screen in a spare room somewhere. The grant will allow us to step up the production.

JA: And the narrative, because we can work with actors and a scriptwriter. The story is very complex. We're working with a guy in Spain who is a film YouTuber. He's helping us write the script. For the next video, we want to go as far as we can. I love how fast technology is going for videos. I don't know about the rest of [technology], but for art and cinema, the next step will be more studios with LED screens. You'll just need to have the idea and it won't be impossible to accomplish something really good with a small studio. I'm really excited where that's going.

SILY: Is your mixtape coming out this month as planned?

JA: It will be out in December now.

AT: When we started releasing these songs, we got management, which we never had. We got an agent in the US. Plans started changing a little bit with the team growing and more people helping us. We were talking to some labels and things like that, and the mixtape got postponed a little bit because of logistics. The special edition vinyl from the UK is still coming out next week. Good for [those people,] they bought it first. Digitally, it will be December 1st with the videos we are working hard on at the moment. When you're an independent band, things happen like this.

SILY: You have a half hour set early in the day at Riot Fest. How do you go about curating a setlist for people who might not have heard you before? How do you present yourselves in that short timespan?

AT: Just smash the bangers. [laughs] It's probably coming down to what we want to show, the songs we feel are the most representative.

JA: All the new songs, the songs from the mixtape. There's an intro, interludes with bits of the story of the music videos. It's really dense, but in a good way. We're trying to play who we are now. We are kind of eclectic. When we started, we played a different sort of genre of music. That was us, but we were signed [to a label] and had to obey certain rules. We couldn't be 100% free. This set, what we're planning to do for Riot Fest, we've been rehearsing religiously every day. We want to play the heaviest music we have. We want to try to show every little facet of what we do. Kind of like when you have tasters of beers. Hopefully it works.

AT: We have to be really disciplined during the set itself since it's 30 minutes. We have to be as condensed as possible.

JA: We had to time tuning our guitars. We do a mockup every day we practice. We try to time it, and I memorize exactly what I'm going to say. We try to make a good impression. Maybe people will want more. Hopefully, people will like it.

SILY: Can you talk about your most recent song, "Square One"?

JA: The mixtape is extremely DIY. It was the most DIY and cheap thing you can think of. We recorded the instruments in the kitchen. Our friend mixed and mastered it almost for nothing. For us, this is what we can do with no resources. "Square One", most of the vocals are gang vocals because there's not much time to rerecord them. It's one reason we wanted the mixtape to be self-released, to make it the purest form of DIY. I don't think it can get more DIY. It gets clearer and clearer through the process. The next song will be four videos in one, to make a short movie. We're calling it a mixtape and not an album to express that there are no resources put into these songs. That's the best we can do with just us, an interface and getting the stems to our friend. We're really lucky. We have the chance for songs to get into playlists. They're there with bands who have the best production, where you can hear how good it sounds. I feel proud that it's there in those playlists. It's been good.

SILY: Your first two full-length albums were on labels, but the mixtape is being self-released. Why did you go independent?

JA: We started the band in 2016. We're foreigners and didn't know anybody in England. Alizon had to learn English. It was pretty hard. We were squatting in London. When we got an offer to sign, we had to go through the terms. I think we did well in getting the opportunities, because they wouldn't have come otherwise, but because we [initially] obeyed a bit too much, [we didn't end up working] the way labels expected us to be working. We were signed to an English label [Modern Sky], and they were expecting much more reception than we got. We got dropped, which was great for us, and then we got signed by another label [300 Entertainment], but it was the same thing: We couldn't do what they wanted. If people don't understand you, it won't work. It didn't work with the second label. But then we had the freedom to do exactly what we wanted. To us, that was the best thing that could have happened, to have 100% freedom to make our own decisions and strategy, even marketing strategy like Instagram and TikTok. We don't have PR or radio people, but we did what we could and saw what happened. Nothing against labels--and we still want to sign to one--but this wasn't a decision and was just what we had to deal with. We got an offer for a label ages ago, but it was to do exactly what they say, which hadn't worked in the past. We got dropped, owed so much money, and were broke, unable to record or release new music. So we're self-releasing this and will be able to profit a bit from it. We own our publishing, the songs' masters. We can buy food, and that's good!

[cosmicanger]

“wish y'all would stop hyping up french protests because they will always continue to fail to result in any fundamental change as long as french's history, including that of today, of brutal colonialism is not addressed.”

“why don’t we protest like france” because you call anybody who does anything cool an outside agitator or secret fed or adrenaline junkie and you do not protect frontliners when they catch serious charges. unserious. you don’t have riots without rioters. you thought fireworks and construction supplies were a psyop. now you want barricades?”

“These fools literally cant handle a Black person calling out antiBlackness before it is socially profitable & they doing NOTHING to support Black folks protesting c*p city have the nerve to ask “omg where the protests in the empirical core?!””

“Most folks are way too into snitch-jacketing, fed-jacketing & badjacketing Black folks who call out anti-Blackness before it is socially profitable while engaging with various other COINTELPRO activities. Not serious at all.”

“I will still never ever forgive Twitter for turning on the girlfriend of Rayshard Brooks when she burnt up the same Wendy’s that got him killed…”

“"Imagine if people in the US protested like this" THEY DID! In 2020! The police beat the shit out of us! You all were there! It's wild to watch cause people are acting as if we're not living through the reaction to the Floyd protests. They're passing more laws to continue targeting protesters right now! They're charging protesters with domestic terrorism right now! This is because of those protests! Literally passed laws that made it okay for people to hit protesters with their cars. That was the response. The issue is here when things get to burning, Black people are blamed and the specter of Black violence doesn't stir the same revolutionary fervor for the public the way the French protests seem to inspire. If you're lamenting the lack of radical action in response to exploitive fiscal policy in the US, maybe we should look at the fact that the police have been given functional impunity for harming protesters with right-wing militias increasingly being deputized as well. But y'all want a radical confrontation with capital while funding the police as if we don't know how that will play out.”