Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,106]

[Vesper 30,106]

Europe’s moral compass, lost at sea

The Greek migrant shipwreck was another preventable tragedy at the borders of Europe.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-moral-compass-lost-at-sea

The Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy has been described as the ‘world’s most dangerous maritime crossing‘. This was proved once again last week in the tragic shipwreck of a boat full of men, women and children, around 50 miles from the southern Greek town of Pylos.

The boat was being tracked by the Hellenic Coastguard, which said that those on board refused assistance repeatedly and wanted to continue to Italy. It was for this reason that no active rescue took place, according to the coastguard.

But activist groups, including Alarm Phone, an emergency hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean, have contested this account. In an email to authorities, published by the investigative journalists We Are Solomon, Alarm Phone alerted authorities to the vessel’s location and reported that ‘several people, among them some babies, are very sick. The people on the boat said that they cannot go on.’

Mixed reports and timelines have continued to come out and survivors’ stories and experiences are starting to be reported. Alarm Phone claimed that Maltese and Italian authorities were also aware of the vessel’s situation and that ‘European authorities could have sent out adequate rescue resources without delay. They failed to do so because their desire to prevent arrivals was stronger than the need to rescue hundreds of lives.’

International lawyers and former members of the Hellenic Coastguard have said that authorities should have rescued the boat regardless of whether passengers requested help, not least because the vessel was unseaworthy and overcrowded. As the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the UK has made clear, it is a duty—both moral and under international maritime law—to save lives at sea.

Pushbacks

This is far from the first time the Hellenic Coastguard has faced accusations of endangering asylum-seekers’ lives at sea. In March 2020, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, thanked Greece for acting as the European Union’s ‘shield’. She pledged to work in solidarity with the country to ensure that as a priority ‘order is maintained‘ at Greece’s external border, also an external border of the European Union.

What this means in practice has become clear with accusations and mounting evidence that the Hellenic Coastguard is conducting illegal pushbacks, preventing access to the right to claim asylum once a person has entered a state’s territory. Human-rights advocates, MEPs and other non-governmental organisations have repeatedly accused both the Hellenic Coastguard and Frontex (the European border and coastguard agency) of involvement in pushbacks.

In October 2022, a report by the EU anti-fraud watchdog, OLAF, published by German media, accused Frontex of covering up or failing to investigate serious allegations of human-rights violations. A video published by the New York Times last month appeared to show coastguard vessels abandoning at sea people who had landed in Greece. Again, this would be a violation of their right under international law to claim asylum, having landed on the island of Lesbos, in Greek territory.

If the Hellenic Coastguard’s account of the recent shipwreck is true, and those on board the vessel wanted to continue to Italy and avoid Greek territory, it’s important to consider why this would be the case. One reason might very well be the growing awareness of the risk of pushbacks.

These events suggest that Europe’s ‘shield’ is not prioritising saving the lives of those seeking safety, but rather, as von der Leyen said in that same press conference in 2020, making sure ‘order is maintained’ when ‘migrants that have been lured through false promises into this desperate situation’ find themselves at Europe’s door.

Deterrence policies

In 2016, Donald Tusk, then president of the European Council, warned people against making dangerous crossings to the EU. He said: ‘Do not come to Europe. Do not believe the smugglers. Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing.’

Statements like this wrongly suggest that people make these journeys out of choice, that a far easier alternative exists. But, as the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire put it poignantly, ‘You have to understand, no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.’

Making these journeys less safe will not prevent them from happening. The failure to rescue, the decision to push back, only puts the lives of people in boats at risk. It does not prevent other people making those journeys in the future.

Shipwrecks such as this are preventable, but only if EU policy moves away from its focus on closing borders and ‘maintaining order’, towards one of humanitarian action. This would mean the opening of genuinely safe routes for people seeking safety, that do not rely on them entering the territory of a state on a crowded, dangerous vessel to be able to make an asylum claim.

[NikkiCFC 8,294]

They have oxygen for 2 more hours on Titan if they are not done already. What a amateurish mission. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

The traffickers or some of the illegal immigrants or both told the story about the rope to the crazy lefty opposition leader Tsipras (n.b. he would love it if it true).
This is what the Guardian wrote.
In their first statement they said nothing of the kind, but they changed testimony later.

Indeed the towing rope would be the only way to ultimately salvage this ship.
Other means such as the big lifesaving ships of the navy would take more time to arrive at the scene.
So if a tow was applied it was in order to save the ship but a tragic mistake happened (plus the coastguard vessels are not well equiped for such actions).
But the Greek coastguard maintain they did n't do anything of the sort because the ship was moving slowly towards Italy and they were only shadowing it.

The traffickers in charge of the ship themselves were most reluctant to get any help - for obvious reasons.
I don't know about a pushback from Greece to Tobruk, but the traffickers are always arrested if found.
As long as the ship was in motion or they hoped to repair the engine they were n't accepting any help.
If during the last minutes, they had stopped for good then the incident with the towing rope may have happened is a possibility.

The attacks against Greece are from the communist left, Turkey, Qatar etc and the BBC who have such orders because of the parthenon marbles issue.

[Vesper 30,106]

GOP: "How Dare You Tell the Truth!"

The essence of fascism is intimidation. It stops resistance, stifles opposition, and causes the fearful and desperate to cooperate. It scares off both researchers, reporters, and opinion writers…

https://hartmannreport.com/p/gop-how-dare-you-tell-the-truth-a1b

She thought she was doing the right thing, tracking down the source of deadly lies that killed a half-million Americans and almost led to the overthrow of the US government.

Little did she know that the very people whose behavior she was studying would use the power of government to try to destroy her work, funding, and even her personal life and reputation.

University of Washington disinformation researcher Kate Starbird learned the hard way: according to The Washington Post she’s been sued — along with multiple other disinformation-studying academics — by groups, sites, and people who are, in many cases, affiliated with some of the more prolific purveyors of disinformation on the web.

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is using the awesome power of the state to threaten disinformation researchers with jail if they don’t drop what they’re doing and submit to onerous subpoenas for correspondence and testimony.

These demands cost them time and money while elevating them into the crosshairs of rightwing trolls and lone-wolf stochastic terrorists.

How and why is this happening?

The “party of ideas” has abandoned that quaint sobriquet from the Reagan and Paul Ryan eras, replacing it with a vigorous embrace of pure lies:

— The 2020 election was stolen.
— Voter fraud by Black people is rampant and must be stopped.
— Climate change is not caused by fossil fuels.
— Gays, lesbians, and trans people want to “convert” your kids.
— Public school teachers are part of a union-based communist conspiracy.
— Cutting billionaire taxes helps working class people.
— Teaching American history injures white children.
— Covid is like the flu and the vaccine is dangerous.
— Expanding Medicare or regulating Big Pharma will break our healthcare system.
— Russia didn’t help Trump.
— The media has a liberal bias.
— Public schools have failed.
— Abortions and birth control cause cancer, infertility, and regret.
— January 6^th wasn’t a traitorous coup attempt.

Little mini-industries are devoted to each of these lies, building profitable niches in the rightwing ecosystem both online and in political spaces.

Often funded by democracy-skeptical rightwing billionaires and online donations from Republican grassroots followers, their messages are amplified by social media algorithms because their very outrageousness increases the screen time they produce.

The lies and misinformation industry really took off with the 2016 presidential campaign, and the academic effort to study it began at the same time, when it was revealed that Russia was using Facebook and Twitter to push anti-Hillary and pro-Trump propaganda.

Since then, people and organizations generating and spreading these lies have moved into public health via Covid and used deception and faux grass-roots groups to go after voting rights and public education with a vengeance.

And they very much do not like being called out for the lies and misinformation they generate and spread.

Most people would rather be punched in the face than served with a subpoena demanding 8 years of correspondence, including notes that may be highly personal, that can then be aired in public by grandstanding politicians.

In addition to the embarrassment, the attorneys’ costs alone can break a middle class person. And being named or dragged before a congressional committee puts a bulls-eye on a person’s back, sometimes leading to death threats, vandalism of their home, swatting attempts, and actual break-ins and physical violence.

There’s a word for this: fascism.

The essence of fascism is intimidation. It stops resistance, stifles opposition, and causes the fearful and desperate to cooperate. It scares off both researchers, reporters, and opinion writers.

As William Shirer, the historian who lived in Germany during the early years of Hitler’s rise to power, wrote in his seminal Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

“In Nazi parlance, ‘educated’ meant ‘intimidated’— to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism.”

In that context, the MAGA wing of the GOP is devoted to “education.”

And they can pull off their intimidation without fear of lawsuits or other consequences: Jim Jordan, as a member of Congress, enjoys the same near-total immunity from accountability that Senator Joseph McCarthy famously used to destroy thousands of innocent lives in the 1950s.

In Article 6 of the Constitution — the “Speech and Debate Clause” — it says:

“They [Members of Congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

Jordan’s committee has been busy using their power to intimidate — and even break — researchers and reporters in an apparent effort to destroy their ability to conduct their work. And if that’s their goal, it’s working.

As The Washington Post reported earlier this month:

“The pressure has forced some researchers to change their approach or step back, even as disinformation is rising ahead of the 2024 election. …

“The deluge of bad information about disinformation researchers’ work also has led to a torrent of digital harassment, threats and smears. …

“‘The political part is intimidating — to have people with a lot of power in this world making false claims, false accusations about our work,’ Starbird said.”

She deleted her Twitter account, which had roughly 50,000 followers, and has largely quit doing media or public appearances. After testifying as a disinformation expert to the January 6^th committee, her employer was flooded with lawsuits for her correspondence and she was warned that, as the Post noted, “they knew where she lived.”

And Jordan and his peers aren’t just going after high-profile researchers and universities.

While their most well-known targets have included Stanford, Clemson, NYU, University of Washington, the German Marshall Fund, the National Conference on Citizenship, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, The Atlantic Council, the Virality Project, and the Election Integrity Partnership, their apparent intimidation efforts reach all the way down to students, volunteers, and tipsters.

One professor asked the Post to keep his name out of the story about Jordan’s harassment, “citing concerns for his family’s safety.” A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told the Post that this activity “wasn’t something we saw until a few years ago.”

Republican efforts to stop any person or institution who points out the lies, fabrications, and misinformation they depend on to win elections have gone into hyperdrive.

The quaint old Reagan lies about “union bosses” and “supply-side economics” aren’t enough to keep the rubes in line anymore, so the GOP has now adopted Steve Bannon’s famous strategy.

As he told reporter Michael Lewis:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Bannon later added:

“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”

But don’t you dare call them on it. If you do, there will be a huge price to pay and you’ll deeply regret having ever taken on the job of exposing the Republican lie and spin machine.

As The New York Times, in an article titled GOP Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election, noted:

“[Researchers] face mounting legal costs and questions from directors and donors about the risks raised by studying disinformation. Online attacks have also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, scared away students.”

This is, of course, the goal of Jordan’s efforts.

A man who was deeply entangled with Trump’s efforts to overthrow our form of government but appears to have escaped scrutiny by virtue of Merrick Garland’s timidity, Jordan’s threats appear designed to prevent any serious challenges to his power or to the lies the GOP depends on for electoral success.

“Whether directly or indirectly,” Jordan wrote without a trace of irony or self-consciousness, “a government-approved or -facilitated censorship regime is a grave threat to the First Amendment and American civil liberties.”

Yeah, Jim.

Tell us about it.

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

On 22/06/2023 at 01:10, NikkiCFC said:

They have oxygen for 2 more hours on Titan if they are not done already. What a amateurish mission. 

James Cameron was making a few good points around the incident. I personally think that the focus on the mini sub is because of the the novelty and engineering aspects, and not humane at all. Few care about the people onboard, which makes folks at least consistent.

The media coverage strengthens my belief that reporting the news is no longer as profitable as "making the news." At a time where media outlets have shareholders, much of what happens can be explained by the proverbial "follow the money."

If you missed Cameron's points, 1. everyone involved who knew anything about the subject matter knew the sub was lost and everyone dead first day; 2. the implosion was "heard." (by military and/or research equipment); 3 the French rescue operation knew exactly where to look for the debris; and finally, he questioned the design of the sub as well as the materials used.

Suppose the rest was just the media milking the story into oblivion and the coast guard wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars.

Edited June 24, 2023 by robsblubot

[cosmicway 1,333]

comitia Graeca 25 iunii 2023

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

Civil War in Russia ? Wagner group tanks attack Moscow, all Muscovites told to stay indoors by Mayor.

Even if it fails, Putins authority is surely undermined.

[cosmicway 1,333]

45 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Civil War in Russia ? Wagner group tanks attack Moscow, all Muscovites told to stay indoors by Mayor.

Even if it fails, Putins authority is surely undermined.

This happens when the army is defeated:
Greece 1922, July plot, Bulgaria 1944, Portugal 1974 ...
What is happening there ?
They are not supposed to have been defeated yet.

Edited June 24, 2023 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

Prigozhin has now ordered the tanks to stop going on to Moscow ''to avoid bloodshed''.

If you employ mercenaries, by their very nature they have no loyalty.

[cosmicway 1,333]

19 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Prigozhin has now ordered the tanks to stop going on to Moscow ''to avoid bloodshed''.

If you employ mercenaries, by their very nature they have no loyalty.

It was about money.
Was happening in ancient allied armies too, irrespective of the outcome of the wars:
Petsenevegs and Patsilinaks.
Attila the Hun's armies.
Magyars and Bulgarians notably, when they were supposed to be fighting against the expansion of the Ottoman empire.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Mitsotakis appears to be winning in Greece wiith some 42% of the vote and overall majority in parliament.
It's a huge record in a parliament with 8-9 parties.
In old parliaments with three parties the percentages were higher but with many parties as is happening in recent years it is a super-record.
Tsipras and the left were of course destroyed but the anticlimax is that the neonazis reappeared with some 4% and they are expected to reenter parliament.
There are two more right wing parties not so wild as the neonazis and they too have increased their share of the vote and elect mps.
So now everybody wonders what happened.
But the answer is simple: They sell their old stories about bad immigrants, coloured peeople etc plus the anti-vax, anti-masks mythology of the covid years.

This whole thing started sometime in April 2020 with a crazy woman journalist in Salonika who refused to stay at home and attacked the policemen.
We thought it was just an isolated weirdo but then the ultra-rightists occupied a church and wanted to hold a mass - evading the quarantine.
It escalated, then in 2021 the vaccine arrived and we entered the antivax phase:

There was yet one more antivax party led by crazy journalist Tragas.
But he ... died from covid in December 2021.
The man was a diabetic and his doctor, a leading diabetologist, advised him in the strongest possible words to get vaccinated but he did n't listen.
When he died he left in his will tens of luxury houses in Athens - Paris - London - Beverly Hills - other places and all these was found out was from 
black money and the tax authority had to consfiscate them !
But these things do not deter our golden dawnie friends ...

 

 

Edited June 26, 2023 by cosmicway

[cosmicway 1,333]

A more careful analysis of the Greek result shows now that the neonazis mayhave benefited from the low turnout.
Their final 4.75% percentage would have been 4.00% with normal turnout.
But from the numbers it looks very much the case that the left wing SYRIZA party were the ones who gave them a significant bonus.
They always do that. 
They don't own up but they believe the presence of a strong neonazi party will destroy society and create civil war conditions.

Edited June 26, 2023 by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 17,306]

Court has ruled it unlawful to send refugees from UK to Rwanda

Apart from the 500m to Macron and 200 million to Rwanda it is also costing us taxpayers 9m a day for the hotels.

Three large Conservative run firms have contracts to run the hotels. Serco, Mears, and Calder. All are tory donors and have seen their profits trebled with their CEOs pay increase from 250 000 to 2.5 million each. Just another way the tories steal public money. No wonder they have no incentive to solve the 'crisis'. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

Ode to the resignation of Alexis Tsipras (Alexis Tsipras s'en va t'en guerre)

 

Edited June 29, 2023 by cosmicway