Tag: racism

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Knowledge Trumps Faith, always

Source: Trump’s pro-Israel cabinet picks upset Muslims who voted for him | Reuters

The Muslim community’s disappointment in the exceptionally pro-Israel cabinet candidates that Donald Trump has thus far named is the ultimate proof that bargaining in good faith with a known bad actor guarantees one’s loss. Given the president elect’s history of instituting Muslim immigration bans, denigrating Muslims and embracing Benjamin Netanyahu, it is unfathomable how anyone could have had faith that he would approach the Gaza military conflict any more favorably toward Palestinians than Joe Biden. Knowledge of his past attitudes and actions provided absolute certainty of his intentions. Why did these leaders blink?

These Muslim leaders are not young men. They range in age from their 40s into their 70s. It is unfathomable that men in leadership positions can retain such naïveté into such old ages. Anyone endowed with good memory learns by his or her early 40s that bargaining in good faith while one fully knows the other party’s ill intentions is a terrible idea, a nonstarter. Even men of faith should have realized that one places faith in God, not in men. Faith in God is a tool with which one places accountability on men. The absence of accountability in this scenario casts unbounded doubt on the faith of the Muslim leaders.

Muslim leaders backed Donald Trump to protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and attacks on Lebanon. His choices are staunch supporters of their foe.

 

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Why the US Green Party are Bona Fide Losers

The Green Party in the United States has been nothing but a joke. Measured by the goals it has set for itself, it is an unmitigated disaster and an absolute, complete, pathetic and unqualified loser because it has successfully helped elect administrations that forcefully realized the exact opposite of all of the party’s goals: George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

In contrast, faced with the prospect of a racist regime, fringe French political parties have the good sense to bow out in order to ensure the racist party’s loss. These French parties will sacrifice their own victory in order to assure a greater victory for the greater good. The US Green Party (and Robert F Kennedy, Jr.) has so little sense that when faced with the prospect of electing a tyrant, it elects to jump in order to siphon off enough votes from democrats and to elect the party it opposes. The Green Party has never won a race. It has never elected anyone to the US Congress, it has never garnered a majority in any district, and it has never formed any meaningful alliance with another party toward accomplishing a single policy objective. French parties will sacrifice actual parliamentary presence for the greater good, but the US Green Party works diligently to expand its losing ways to the national scene. Sacrifice and compromise are neither realities nor ideals in the American political system. They are concepts aped by infantile egomaniacs who will never mature enough to grasp either concept.

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How Facebook and Google Fund Global Misinformation: the “Free” Internet is Much too Expensive

The advertising scheme that fuels the profits of the “free” internet giants like Google and Facebook is now used by terrorists to fund their activities.

In thrillers like The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth, the books of John Le Carre, and numerous movies like The French Connection, one learns of the ways in which rogue groups (terrorists, especially) would raise funds: they would rob banks. burglarize rich people, hijack cash transfer trucks, etc. The article below from the MIT Technology Review details how fringe and rogue groups dedicated to disinformation use the Google and Facebook advertising systems to generate revenue for their activities, and this article from the Associated Press details how the same fringe groups–white supremacists in particular–are using cryptocurrencies (1) to receive funds anonymously from people who do not wish it be known that they are racist and (2) to avoid paying financial judgments rendered against them in civil trials. As Shoshana Zuboff has reminded us over and over, regulation is designed to eliminate businesses that threaten the marketplace and erode trust in capitalism. The “free internet” meets both of these criteria, and it must be regulated.

Source: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.