#south african army

[carbone14]

M4 Sherman de la 6th South African Armoured Division détruits pendant la prise des hauteurs de Pérouse – Campagne d'Italie – Pérouse – Italie – 1944

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Near Victory Turned to Defeat for British Forces," Kingston Whig-Standard. June 26, 1942. Page 10. ---- When these pictures were made in Libya a few short weeks ago things were going well for the British German tanks like the captured one above were being tested. German prisoners like these at left below were being taken. South African gunners like those at right below were blistering the desert with bullets. But Rommel came back with bigger, better armored tanks to take many more thousands of British prisoners, a large part of them South Africans.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Corporal Jackie was a baboon in the South African Army during World War I.

He was the official mascot of the 3rd Transvaal Regimen when his owner Albert Marr was drafted into war and would not leave Jackie at home.

He asked his superiors if Jackie, too, could join the army and they said yes.

So Jackie was given an official style uniform with a cap, a ration set, and his own pay book.

Jackie would salute to superior officers and light soldiers' cigarettes. He would even stand at ease in the style of a trained soldier.

Due to his heightened senses, Jackie was useful to sentries on duty at night.

The baboon would be the first to know when an attack was coming or enemy soldiers were moving around nearby.

Jackie and Marr survived a battle where the casualty rate was 80%, in Delville Wood, early in the Somme Campaign.

When Marr was serving in Egypt, he was shot in the shoulder at the Battle of Agagia, 26 February 1916, while Jackie was with him, licking the wound as they awaited help.

Jackie was given his own rations while with the army and ate them with his own knife and fork, as well as his own washing basin.

When the regiment was drilled and marched, Jackie would be with them.

Jackie spent time in the trenches in France where he tried to build a wall around himself during extreme enemy fire.

However, a piece of shrapnel from an explosion flew over the wall hitting Jackie in the leg and arm.

When stretcher bearers tried to take Jackie away, he refused, desperate to finish his wall and hide.

Doctors treated Jackie's wounds, but they decided his leg had to be amputated and were surprised that he even survived.

Jackie was awarded a Medal of Valor for the event of his injuries and promoted from private to corporal.

After the war was over, Jackie was discharged with papers and went back to South Africa. He tragically died in a house fire in 1921.

[ggukkieisintominnie]

Guess who's going to see Jungkook🥳🥳🥳

finally something BTS came to South Africa... now I patiently wait for 2025 tour dates 🕯🕯🕯

I'm so excited the drip is gonna be VERY DEMURE AND VERY MINDFUL... 😌💅🏾

[cid5]

Member of South African Special Forces Brigade, during South African Border War.

[childoftimeandmagic]

A dear friend of mine asked me today to be in her wedding.

A different friend took her three week vacation time to visit her grandmother in Khan Younis at the end of September. I lost contact with her in November. Her mother believes she's dead.

I got a client out of county who should have never been there in the first place today.

Mothers I will never know watched their children burn to death not even two weeks ago and I'm forced to do my job like the world's nor actively destroying us.

My sister's girlfriend is all moved into my sister's apartment today after a year and a half apart.

Queer Palestinians are once again facing a pinkwashed genocide.

My cat is turning 21 this year. She's been with me since I was nine.

How many families in Gaza have had to abandon their pets who they loved as fiercely as another family member to save the rest of their loved ones?

My best friend has been dead for the last three years. Her husband still cries on her headstone everyday, like she died yesterday.

How many husbands, fathers, sons, men have no place safe to grieve tonight in Gaza? How many graves have been destroyed, how many partnerships, families, and communities torn and shredded asunder???

I'm 5,634 mi or 9,067 km from Gaza but its pain, it's plight, it's heartache, it's destruction paid for by my taxes and with my elected officials gleeful greedy cheers is never more than a thought from my mind.

[thejohnfleming]

Our trip from a Canadian strip club via US neo-Nazis, South Africa to Rhodesia

David Hughes in the 1980s… This all started, three blogs ago, as a piece about David Hughes, who worked as a doorman/cashier/DJ at the Le Strip club in Toronto from 1982 to 1994.  It then began to divert via undercover work for the CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), neo-Nazis, a massive counterfeiting scheme, planned terrorism in the 1980s, a far right Christian Identity…

[sayruq]

South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor said that nationals who have served in the Israeli army will be prosecuted upon re-entering the country, as Israel continues its devastating war on the Gaza Strip for the sixth month. "I've already issued a statement alerting those who are South African and who are fighting alongside or in the Israeli Defense Force. We are ready. When you come home, we're going to arrest you," Pandor said during an African National Congress meeting earlier this week.

[heritageposts]

As a Black South African, watching these horrific events unfold, I cannot but reflect on my country’s own violent past. I recall the relentless planning and violence that accompanied the last decades of white South Africa’s attempts to make apartheid work. I remember the fears that grew among white South Africans as they put their trust in a sophisticated military capability, a conscription army, a nuclear weapons capacity and steadfast friends in the West, particularly the United States, Britain and France. It was the height of the Cold War and South Africa claimed to be the only democracy in Southern Africa, protecting “civilisation” from the encroaching threats surrounding it. Its military might and expansive police force were accompanied by a series of policies designed to maintain white minority rule. Each attempt to impose new such policies failed in the face of mass resistance. The more they failed, the more brutal the violence meted out by the military and the police with the encouragement of white politicians and a terrified white electorate. The “terrorists”, as the national liberation movements were referred to, could not be crushed by the mightiest army in Southern Africa. By mid-1985 a significant section of the white electorate and some in the ruling party realised that the problem of Black resistance was not going to go away. Something more drastic was going to be required.

. . . continues at Al Jazeera (16 Nov 2023)

[bfpnola]

ID 1: Screenshot of a post by @/key48return on Instagram. Background is of a globe with pinpoints of the israeli flag all over North and South America. Title reads in all caps, “israel is involved in oppression all over the world not just in Palestine…” A yellow arrow points right underneath the title. End ID

ID 2: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE - 1994

ISRAEL EXPORTED SUBSTANTIAL WEAPONS AND ARMS TO THE HUTU MILITIAS WHO MASSACRED OVER 1 MILLION TUTSI CIVILIANS IN RWANDA ACROSS THE DURATION OF 100 DAYS.

WEAPONS USED IN THE GENOCIDE INCLUDED ISRAELI-MADE 5.56MM BULLETS, RIFLES AND GRENADES. THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE IS RECOGNISED AS THE WORST GENOCIDE IN MODERN HISTORY. ISRAEL HAS REPEATEDLY ATTEMPTED TO CONCEAL THEIR ARMS EXPORTS TO RWANDA BEFORE AND DURING THE GENOCIDE, FEARING PROSECUTION.”

Black and white photos below are shown of various Rwandan children in graveyards or in makeshift tents just trying to get by. End ID.

ID 3: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA 1948 - 1994

ISRAEL WAS A STAUNCH ALLY TO THE SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID REGIME, PROVIDING ANTI-RIOT VEHICLES AND ARMS TO USE AGAINST THE NATIVE BLACK POPULATION, ASSISTING THE REGIME IN CREATING NUCLEAR BOMBS AND ISRAEL ALSO OPPOSED THE GLOBAL EMBARGO AND BOYCOTT OF APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA.

FOR DECADES, THE ZIONIST FEDERATION IN SOUTH AFRICA HONOURED MEN SUCH AS PERCY YUTAR, WHO PROSECUTED NELSON MANDELA FOR SABOTAGE AND CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE STATE IN 1963 AND SENT HIM TO JAIL FOR LIFE. (FOR WHICH HE SERVED 27 YEARS)”

Black and white photos below showcase a Black man being held in a chokehold by a white man, two Black people on their knees and hands up trying not to get shot, and a sign that reads in english and afrikaans “white area.” End ID.

ID 4: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

MAYAN GENOCIDE 1960 - 1996

THROUGHOUT THE GUATEMALAN CIVIL WAR FROM 1960-1996, OVER 200,000+ INDIGENOUS MAYANS WERE MURDERED BY STATE FORCES, AND OVER ONE MILLION MORE DISPLACED, IN WHAT IS REFERRED TO TODAY AS THE MAYAN GENOCIDE.

THE GUATEMALAN STATE FORCES RESPONSIBLE WERE ARMED AND TRAINED BY ISRAEL. WHEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SUSPENDED MILITARY FUNDING TO THE GUATEMALAN STATE FORCES IN 1977 IN THE MIDST OF THE MAYAN GENOCIDE, ISRAEL GAVE THEM OVER $38 BILLION WORTH OF ARMS TO FILL THE GAP. THE 'GALIL' ASAULT RIFLE, AN ISRAELI-MADE WEAPON, WAS STANDARD ISSUE FOR THE GUATEMALAN ARMY BY 1980, WITH THE STATE OWNED SMALL-ARMS PRODUCTION FACILITY IN ALTA VERAPAZ PRODUCING ITS AMMUNITION UNDER ISRAELI ARMS LICENCES.”

Below are multiple in-color photos of Mayan families mourning, one photo in particular which shows indigenous Mayans carrying a seemingly endless line of coffins off into the distance. End ID.

ID 5: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

SREBRENICA - 1995

ALSO KNOWN AS THE SREBRENICA GENOCIDE. IN 1995 OVER 8,000+ BOSNIAN MUSLIMS WERE MASSACRED BY SERBIAN ARMY FORCES ARMED AND TRAINED BY ISRAEL. SERBIAN FORCES ETHNICALLY CLEANSED OVER 250,000+ MUSLIMS IN TOTAL ACROSS CROATIA AND BOSNIA.

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHERS WERE WOUNDED, STARVED, WOMEN WERE MASS RAPED AND MANY WERE INCARCERATED IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. MANY OF THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GENOCIDE FLED TO ISRAEL, WHERE THEY WERE GRANTED ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP IN ORDER TO AVOID ARREST AND PROSECUTION FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.”

Once again, the in-color photos below show various peoples mourning. Two of the photos specifically show people reaching their hands out over extremely long lists of just names of people who have died. End ID.

ID 6: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

TRAINING U.S. POLICE

SINCE 1990, HUNDREDS OF AMERICAN POLICE OFFICERS, INCLUDING AGENTS FROM THE FBI, CIA AND IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE), HAVE EITHER BEEN SENT TO ISRAEL THROUGH POLICE TRAINING EXCHANGES, OR ATTENDED SUMMITS WITHIN THE U.S. THAT WERE SPONSORED BY ISRAELI LOBBY ORGANISATIONS.

THE KNEE-TO-NECK 'RESTRAINT' THAT DEREK CHAUVIN MURDERED GEORGE FLOYD WITH, IS OFTEN USED BY ISRAELI POLICE AND SOLIDERS AGAINST PALESTINIANS.

BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

Photos below are in-color and show various B.L.M. protests. End ID.

ID 7: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

ARMING INDIA'S VIOLENCE IN KASHMIR

INDIA IS ISRAEL'S LARGEST ARMS CLIENT, MAKING UP OVER 45% OF ISRAEL'S ARMS SALES. BUYING ISRAELI AMMUNITION AND AIR-TO-GROUND MISSILES, ON THE PREMISE THEY HAVE BEEN 'BATTLE-TESTED' ON PALESTINIANS IN GAZA. ISRAEL PROVIDES INDIA WITH THE ARMS INDIA USES TO MILITARILY OCCUPY KASHMIR AND BRUTALISE KASHMIRI'S.

SINCE 1989, OVER 100,000+ KASHMIRIS HAVE BEEN KILLED BY INDIAN FORCES. WITH OVER 7,200+ KASHMIRIS BEING MURDERED IN INDIAN POLICE CUSTODY, OVER 110,000+ KASHMIRI CHILDREN HAVE BEEN ORPHANED, AND MORE THAN 11,000+ KASHMIRI WOMEN HAVE BEEN RAPED BY INDIAN OCCUPATION FORCES. IN ADDITION, OVER 7,000+ UNNAMED MASS GRAVES HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED WITH THOUSANDS OF VICTIMS.”

The photos below show israel and india’s leaders shaking hands and various armed indian soldiers stopping Kashmiris for unnecessary checks. End ID.

ID 8: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

PINOCHET COUP - CHILE 1973

CIA BACKED DICTATOR, AUGUSTO PINOCHET TOOK OVER CHILE ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1973. OVERTHROWING ITS DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT, SALVADOR ALLENDE. THE NEXT DAY HIS FORCES BEGAN KIDNAPPING ANYONE THEY SUSPECTED OF BEING LEFT WING AND PLACED THEM IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

PINOCHET'S SECRET POLICE, DINA (DIRECCION DE INTELIGENCIA NACIONAL) RAN THOSE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND TORTURE CENTRES, AND THEY FREQUENTLY ABDUCTED, 'DISAPPEARED' AND EXECUTED CHILEAN CIVILIANS. ISRAEL TRAINED DINA AND WAS ALSO ONE OF PINOCHET'S MAIN ARMS SUPPLIERS.”

Black and white photos below showcase various scenes of armed DINA officers, with one photo in particular showing them in a tank over bodies on the ground, presumably dead. End ID.

ID 9: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:

ETHNICALLY CLEANSING ARMENIANS - ONGOING

ISRAEL HAS BEEN FUNDING AND ARMING AZERBAIJAN'S MILITARY SINCE 1988, ARMS WHICH HAVE BEEN USED TO KILL ARMENIAN CIVILIANS THROUGHOUT AZERBAIJAN'S ONGOING ETHNIC CLEANSING OF ARTSAKH. THE ISRAELI REGIME SUPPLIES AZERBAIJAN WITH OVER 70% OF ITS MILITARY ARSENAL.

IN ADDITION TO PROVIDING THE ARMS TO KILL ARMENIANS, ISRAEL ALSO REFUSES TO RECOGNISE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, COMMITTED BY THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (TURKEY) FROM 1914-1923, WHO SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERED OVER 1.5 MILLION ARMENIAN CIVILIANS.”

Photos below show israel and azerbaijan’s leaders shaking hands, azerbaijan’s soldiers menacingly standing in front of someone wrapped in an Armenian flag, and Armenians mourning over a shrine with their flags all around them. End ID.

ID 10: In all caps, “THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IS CONNECTED TO STRUGGLES ALL AROUND THE WORLD.

BECAUSE OPPRESSORS LIKE ISRAEL ARE NOT ONLY UPHOLDING OPPRESSION AGAINST ONE POPULATION, ITS ALWAYS INTERCONNECTED TO OPPRESSING MANY MORE.

FREE PALESTINE.” No photos at the bottom of this slide. End ID.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering

TOMORROW NIGHT (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners.

After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.

That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.

This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility.

Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.

Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.

What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world.

The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.

If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary.

This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

(Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.)

It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated:

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them.

Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.

If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.

With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.

In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.

One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.

This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/

With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text

With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/

It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.

It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.

It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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[newsfromstolenland]

some of the most infuriating talking points about Palestine are the ones that are like "well x group never attempted armed resistance against colonial occupation". because I can promise that whatever group you're referring to, you're wrong

I've specifically heard it about Indigenous people across "canada" and Indian people. which.

Indigenous people fought back!! they still fight back!! and as an Indian person I can tell you that my ancestors fought the British tooth and nail, we revolted and killed our captors and many of us died but so did many of them

so before you try to rewrite history to make Palestinians seem inferior for fighting against genocide and colonist occupation, please do the bare minimum of historical research. the rest of us fought back to, and they have every right to do as we did.

a few examples off the top of my head: the Lakota people, the Cree, Indians, Algerians, the Irish, South Africans, I could go on

and quick question. do you support Ukrainians fighting the Russian army? Then why not Palestinians? what's the main difference here? 🤔

[blueiscoool]

How Hadrian’s Wall is Revealing a Hidden Side of Roman History

A party invitation. A broken flipflop. A wig. Letters of complaint about road conditions, and an urgent request for more beer.

It sounds like the aftermath of a successful spring break, but these items are nearly 2,000 years old.

They’re just some of the finds from Hadrian’s Wall – the 73-mile stone wall built as the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire, sealing off Britannia (modern-day England and Wales) from Caledonia (essentially today’s Scotland).

While most of us think of Pompeii and Herculaneum if we’re thinking of everyday objects preserved from ancient Rome, this outpost in the wild north of the empire is home to some of the most extraordinary finds.

“It’s a very dramatic stamp on the countryside – there’s nothing more redolent of saying you’re entering the Roman empire than seeing that structure,” says Richard Abdy, lead curator of the British Museum’s current exhibition, Legion, which spotlights the everyday life of Roman soldiers, showcasing many finds from Hadrian’s Wall in the process. A tenth of the Roman army was based in Britain, and that makes the wall a great source of military material, he says.

But it’s not all about the soldiers, as excavations are showing.

A multicultural melting pot

Hadrian, who ordered the wall to be built in 122CE after a visit to Britannia, had a different vision of empire than his predecessors, says Frances McIntosh, curator for English Heritage’s 34 sites along Hadrian’s Wall.

“All the emperors before him were about expanding the empire, but Hadrian was known as the consolidator,” she says. He relinquished some of the territory acquired by his predecessor Trajan, and “decided to set the borders” – literally, in some cases, with wooden poles at sites in Germany, or with stone in Britannia. Where those poles rotted thousands of years ago, the wall is still standing: “A great visual reminder” of the Roman empire, says McIntosh.

It’s not just a wall. There’s a castle every mile along, and turrets at every third-of-a-mile point, with ditches and banks both north and south. “You can imagine the kind of impact that would have had, not just on the landscape but on the people living in the area,” says McIntosh.

And thanks to the finds from the wall, we know a surprising amount about those people.

Although historians have long thought of army outposts as remote, male-dominant places, the excavations along the wall show that’s not the case. Not only were soldiers accompanied by their families, but civilians would settle around the settlements to do business. “ You can almost see Housesteads as a garrison town,” says McIntosh. “There were places you could go for a drink and so on.”

The Roman rule of thumb was not to post soldiers in the place they came from, because of the risk of rebellion. That meant Hadrian’s Wall was a cultural melting point, with cohorts from modern-day Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Algeria, Iraq, Syria – and more. “It was possibly more multicultural because it was a focus point,” says McIntosh, who says that the surrounding community might have included traders from across the empire.

Soldiers were split into two groups. Legionaries were Roman citizens from Italy, who had more rights than other soldiers and imported olive oil, wine and garum (a sauce made from decomposing fish).

They worked alongside auxiliaries – soldiers from conquered provinces, who had fewer rights, but could usually acquire citizenship after 25 years of service.

Soldiers carved their names and regiments on stones to show which part of the wall they built – around 50 of them are on display at Chesters fort.

But the wall shows that women and children were equally present.

McIntosh says that pottery brought to the camps – from the Low Countries and North Africa – shows that the soldiers “brought their families, who cooked in traditional style.” Archaeologists have found what seems to be an ancient tagine for North African-style cooking.

A tombstone from Arbeia fort for a woman named Regina shows she was a freed slave from southern Britain who was bought by – and married to – a Syrian soldier.

Another woman buried at Birdoswald fort was laid to rest with chainmail that appears to be from modern-day Poland. “Perhaps she married someone in the army,” says McIntosh, who calls the wall a “melting pot of people from all over the world under the banner of the army.”

“They brought their own religions, as well as worshipping Roman gods and adopting local deities,” she adds. At Carrawburgh, a temple to Mithras – an originally Persian deity – sat near a spring with a shrine to a local water spirit.

‘Wretched little Brits’

Some of the most extraordinary finds from the Roman empire are coming from one site on Hadrian’s Wall: Vindolanda. Here, archaeologists have found a wealth of organic remains because of what curator Barbara Birley calls the “unusual conditions onsite.”

At Vindolanda there are the remains of at least nine forts over 14 levels. “When the Romans would leave, they would knock down timber forts, and cover the area with turf and clay, sealing the layers underneath,” she says.

“Because it happened so many times, the bottom five or six layers are sealed in anaerobic conditions, so things don’t decay. When we get down there, we get wooden objects, textiles, anything organic.”

Vindolanda has the largest collection of Roman textiles from a single site in western Europe, as well as the largest leather collection of any site in the Roman empire – including 5,000 shoes, and even a broken leather flip-flop. “We probably had a population of 3,000 to 6,000 depending on the period, so 5,000 is a lot,” says Birley. For Abdy, the shoes evoke the conditions of the wet borderlands. “Women’s and children’s shoes are hobnailed – you needed it in the mucky frontier dirt tracks. They’re very evocative.”

There’s even a wig made from a local plant, hair moss, which is said to repel midges – the scourge of Scotland during the summer. A centurion’s helmet is also crested with hairmoss – the ancient equivalent of spraying yourself with insect repellent.

The first woman to write in Latin

One of the most famous finds is the trove of wooden writing tablets – the largest found anywhere.

“They give a snapshot of what life was actually like,” says Birley. “We understand so much more from written correspondence than from ‘stuff,’ and, archaeologically, it’s the stuff that usually survives – things like metals and ceramics.

“These were written in ink, not on a wax stylus tablet, and we believe they were used for what we’d put in emails: ‘The roads are awful,’ ‘The soldiers need more beer.’ Everyday business.”

The tablets – or “personal letters” as Birley describes them – were found on the site of a bonfire when the ninth cohort of Batavians (in the modern-day Netherlands) were told to move on.

“They had a huge bonfire and lots of letters were chucked in the fire. Some have been singed – we think it may have rained,” she says. One of them calls the locals “Britunculi” – “wretched little Brits.” Another talks about an outbreak of pinkeye. One claims that the roads are too bad to send wagons; another laments that the soldiers have run out of beer.

Among the 1,700 letters are 20 that mention a woman called Sulpicia Lepidina. She was the wife of the commander of the garrison, and seems to have played a crucial role. There’s a letter to her from another woman, Paterna, agreeing to send her two medicines, one a fever cure.

Birley says it’s similar to today. “If you’re a group of moms, still today we say, ‘Do you have the Calpol?’ It’s very human.” For Abdy, it’s a sign that women were traders. “She’s clearly flogging her medicines,” he says. “It’s really great stuff.”

Another tablet is an invite from Claudia Severa, the wife of another commander at a nearby camp. It’s an invitation to a birthday party. Under the formal invitation, presumably written by a scribe, is a scrawl in another hand: “I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul.”

Presumably written by Claudia herself, it is thought to be the earliest example of a woman’s handwriting in Latin.

Without the organic finds – the shoes and the letters that indisputably belonged to women, unlike jewellery or weaving equipment – it’s difficult to prove conclusively that women lived in significant numbers. Vindolanda “illustrate the missing gaps,” says Abdy. For Birley, they prove that women were as crucial a part of army communities as men. “Before the Lepidina tablets were found we didn’t really understand the interactions between the soldiers and their wives,” she says. Another tablet is written by what is thought to be a Spanish standard-bearer’s common-law wife, ordering military equipment for her partner.

“The Vindolanda collection is showing that there weren’t just camp followers and prostitutes; women were part of everyday life, and contributing to the military community in many ways,” says Birley.

Abdy says that Hadrian’s Wall is interesting because the resident women span “all classes of society,” from Regina – the dead freedwoman, who would have been “bottom of the heap” – to the trader Paterna and the noblewoman Lepidina.

And of course, there’s the wall itself.

“In the Netherlands and Germany the finds are often stunning and better preserved – you go to museums and are bowled over. But in terms of structural remains, Hadrian’s Wall must be among the best,” says McIntosh, modestly, of her site.

Abdy agrees: “I can’t think of many symbols so redolent of imperial will than that wall.”

By Julia Buckley.

[matan4il]

@anon-e-has-a-tmblr asked regarding this post (that briefly referred to the UN's International Court of Justice's ruling):

Wait didnt the ICJ ruled FOR israel?? I dont understand any of this

That's a very good question. The answer is complex. On the surface, they ruled against Israel. The first part of their decision says Israel must immediately halt its military operations in Rafah, and since most people only read this first part, it was taken as a win by the Israel hating crowd. I don't follow every international news outlet out there, but from what I understand, that's pretty much how it was initially reported across the board. Here's an example from the BBC:

Then, the legal opinions of five of the trial's judges were published, including Aharon Barak's (the globally esteemed judge, former president of Israel's Supreme Court of Justice, and a kid Holocaust survivor... Someone who truly understands what a genocide is because he lived an actual one). Four of the five judges indicated that the ruling actually has a second part, where they mention that the military operations that that Israel must stop immediately in Rafah are limited to the ones which might lead to a genocide (the only judge to publish their opinion and disagree with this interpretation is the South African one. Pretend to be surprised).

In other words, the court didn't say, "Israel IS doing this thing, and therefore must stop," instead it said, "Israel must stop IF what it's doing could cause this thing." What the court ended up ruling is still kind of ambiguous when you try to translate it into practical rules on what is and isn't allowed, but it's probably the best that we could hope for, because it does allow military action in Rafah.

In other words, this is NOT the provisional measure South Africa was asking for, they wanted an immediate junction against any and ALL Israeli military operations in Rafah, and even in Gaza overall (they got neither), not a reference to this, but with an asterisk that allows Israel to continue operating there under certain conditions (though having to be even more cautious with any action that might be misinterpreted as contradicting said conditions). Given how politically biased against Israel the ICJ is, this absolutely can be taken as a win.

The issue is two fold.

First, since Israel is already pretty much already doing more than any other army to aid the civilian population under the rule of the enemy, if this is limiting us even more in having to demonstrate the crimes we're not committing (and think of how hard that actually is... how do you legally prove in-existence? If you had to prove you've never murdered anyone or had an intent to murder anyone, and had to do something beyond showing an arrest record clear of murder charges, how would you do that?) then how much military operational room do we have left to root out Hamas, and will it be enough to achieve our goals of destroying it and bringing back all of our hostages?

Second, and this is arguably the bigger one, is the optics of it. Because so many will only refer to the first part, and act as if the second part doesn't exist, that Israel's military operation in Rafah (you know, the city that Hamas just yesterday used to fire rockets from at central Israel, including Tel Aviv, in what was probably the first massive Hamas rocket attack since January on that area) does have to stop completely, and if we don't halt, then we're criminals. Just like some people used being Israel being to court as if it proves our fault (rather than wait for the required conviction to claim we're guilty), some will use the very fact this new provisional measure was issued to claim it's proof of our crimes, even though it's not.

In fact, I've already seen headlines reflecting how notoriously anti-Israel European Union senior Josep Borell is using this misinterpretation to pretend that Israel has to stop completely, or it's not complying with the court's ruling.

A full win for Israel would have been if the ICJ had ruled that there's no room for new provisional measures.

That was never going to happen with this biased court. Instead, the ICJ used the claim that things are deteriorating in Gaza to rule against Israel, even though it never found that it was Israel's fault that the situation is becoming worse (not to mention that they're basing the estimate of how the humanitarian, rather than military, situation is in Gaza is deteriorating on what Hamas is reporting. You know, the terrorists who are the actual culprits in using the Gazans as human shields, making things worse on purpose, for example through Hamas stealing the aid allowed in, and selling some of it back to Gazans at impossible prices).

So I hope this explains why, even though all things considered Israel got the best result it could at a biased court, it's still seen as a ruling against us, when everyone knows how it will be used (including the judges themselves. Listen to the American ICJ judge on this case, a month ago, already having to explain that the previous provisional measures were not a finding against Israel)...

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[huariqueje]

“A senior legal expert has warned IDF (Israeli army) brass, including Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, that there is real danger that the court will issue an injunction calling on Israel to halt its fire, noting that Israel is bound by the court's rulings,” Israeli daily Haaretz wrote on Monday.

Lawyers have already begun preparing to deal with the complaint, and a hearing on the matter will be held at the Foreign Ministry on Monday, it added.

The newspaper said that according to international legal experts, “the proceeding may cement claims of genocide against Israel, and thus lead to its diplomatic isolation and to boycott or sanctions against it or against Israeli businesses.”

[odinsblog]

In “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment is not about guns – it’s about anti-Blackness. She says it “was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African-Americans powerless and vulnerable.”

Anderson cites legislative debates from the Founding Fathers and a range of historical records to make some bold points. She says some early lawmakers who supported the Second Amendment were more worried about armed Blacks than British redcoats. She says that even after the Civil War ended, many Southern states banned Black citizens from owning weapons.

And that famous line about a “well-regulated militia?” Well, that was inserted primarily to deal with potential slave revolts – not to repel a foreign army, she says.

“The crafting of the Constitution was of primary concern for folks like James Madison because the Articles of Confederation were not working. And when they went to the Constitutional Convention, the Southern delegates made it really clear that they weren’t going to sign off on any kind of Constitution to strengthen the United States of America unless they could get the clear extension on the Atlantic slave trade, the Three-Fifths Clause so they could get more representation than they were due in Congress, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Those were the bribes. That was the sign-off for the South to sign off on the Constitution.

But then as Virginia is looking at this Constitution and sees the federal control of the militia, this is when Patrick Henry and George Mason really started leading the charge. And that charge was about either scuttling the Constitution or getting a Bill of Rights to curtail the power of the central government and protecting the militia. Protecting the militia means that they are protecting slavery.

One of the things that many previous historians have not linked up was the role of the militia in putting down slave revolts, in buttressing slave patrols and keeping enslaved Black people, and free Blacks, under the boot of White supremacy.

The emphasis on the Second Amendment has been crafted as a well-regulated militia in terms of (opposing) a tyrannical government or stopping a foreign invasion, and the individual right to bear arms. That’s the way it’s been cast in the legal debates. That’s driven our historical debates. We’ve got a weird bifurcation in the scholarship between the history of slavery and the history of the Second Amendment. What I’m doing is saying these things are all happening at the same time. Let’s see what’s really going on.”

(continue reading)