xipe posted:what are the conspiracies around antiquities looting (a market estimated to be in the $billions annually)?
death squads like to fundraise with them, and rich people like to buy them, and neocons like to destroy the culture of colonised nations ... is that all there is to it?
just another part of the traditional work of empire that has been outsourced to death squads i guess? i am immediately reminded that the british museum is still refusing to return australian aboriginal artefacts and indeed human remains despite years of petitioning. sorry no links off the top of my head but you get the point.
late 20th/early 21st century empire is all the same shit, just more fully privatised
I've found it strange the upper classes have not lobbied their governments to stop the wholesale destruction of heritage via groups like isis, seems like that would be close to their 'hearts'.
Similarly, I don't understand why western Christians are ok with that religion being cleansed from the holy land.
More positively, the communist conspiracy in the US is going well by all accounts
xipe posted:There is a lot of sentiment among bourgeoisie that they & western countries need to grab mesopotamian artifacts for 'safe-keeping'.
I've found it strange the upper classes have not lobbied their governments to stop the wholesale destruction of heritage via groups like isis, seems like that would be close to their 'hearts'.
Similarly, I don't understand why western Christians are ok with that religion being cleansed from the holy land.
a scorched earth policy seems to be taken for granted, so "doing the right thing" now simply means whisking away anything deemed to be of value (artefacts, christian refugees) to the core
xipe posted:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/israels-yinon-plan-saudi-wahhabism-us-wars-arab-christians-pushed-mass-exodus/228409/
http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html?m=1
aerdil posted:well looks like both the NSA leaker and the intercept were idiots and got her caught lol
http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html?m=1
there's an important lesson here for leftists that liberal groups that facilitate whistle-blowing already know, which is that you show documents to journalists in person to corroborate the validity of what you're revealing but only hand over the text as a hand-typed or OCR-generated copy with precautions taken to reduce your footprint on it. that may take a while if you're leaking a lot of stuff and they insist on reviewing the documents in full, but unless you intend on going public with your own role in the near future, you simply should not trust any but the most experienced and dedicated publishers of leaks as a link in the chain of custody for leaked documents in any "original" digital or printed format because of the many ways the identity of a whistle-blower can be extracted from them. most journalists will not be able to resist the opportunity to cover their own asses and ride the fame train by putting everything you give to them out there whether or not they are aware of the ways it can be tracked back to the whistle-blower.
if they insist on receiving the documents from you in forms that will cause trouble for you, go talk to somebody else about them. it is almost always better to meet with someone in person and risk them revealing something about you in their story than to hand over sensitive documents "anonymously" that are probably designed on some level to reveal whistle-blowers or even internal users with pinpoint & exact accuracy. and if what you have is worth publicizing, you will probably be able to find someone who will work with you to do it under those terms. it is even better if you can find a non-journalist intermediary with a good track record for handling whistle-blowing. sadly there are probably very few of these among organized leftists because of lack of resources compared to liberal interest groups.
in any case under legal regimes such as the United States you are always facing the possibility of a court nailing the journalist to the wall and getting some piece of information that reveals who you are by threatening the journalist, but that doesn't mean whistle-blowers should stop doing it. leaks come with an element of personal risk that the whistle-blower has to accept but there are ways to mitigate it and a big one is to realize that the person publishing what you provide is not your friend and usually makes a living out of telling hot stories, which tend to do more to draw future sources toward them than any measures taken to protect the current source.
aerdil posted:i guesS.... reality winner.... did not win... ... ....... at reality.. ... .........
whose truman show am i in
Petrol posted:the CIA-vatican-nazi nexus is my favourite conspiracy topic
i was thinking about how even the nazis escaping to south america through vatican ratlines distracts from how nazis like Gehlen just walked straight into working with the americans and from then into ruling positions west germany. its not even remotely conspiracy stuff its just....history
drwhat posted:I can't really deal with the fact that I'm supposed to believe someone exists with the name Reality Winner
whose truman show am i in
it's definitely a really bad neal stephenson or neil gaiman book
tears posted:Petrol posted:the CIA-vatican-nazi nexus is my favourite conspiracy topic
i was thinking about how even the nazis escaping to south america through vatican ratlines distracts from how nazis like Gehlen just walked straight into working with the americans and from then into ruling positions west germany. its not even remotely conspiracy stuff its just....history
i always felt like the Operation Paperclip 'revelations' (the yanks bringing over the nazi rocket scientists etc to use their expertise) were the more direct distraction. because it seems more reasonable to make use of scientists who worked for the nazis than to, say, use actual death squad operators and other nazi collaborators to run your overseas spy operations and propaganda networks
Petrol posted:i always felt like the Operation Paperclip 'revelations' (the yanks bringing over the nazi rocket scientists etc to use their expertise) were the more direct distraction. because it seems more reasonable to make use of scientists who worked for the nazis than to, say, use actual death squad operators and other nazi collaborators to run your overseas spy operations and propaganda networks
OTOH science is an act in the world and reflects a society's mode of production, and the intellectual whose skill in a discipline can be applied indiscriminate of politics is a bad-faith myth. In practical terms this means that e.g. liberal policy-makers look to scientists to tell them what lines of inquiry / application should and shouldn't be pursued & sift out anyone who doesn't seem "reasonable" to the policy-makers or whose suggestions go against the leaders appointed by those policy-makers (in this case literal Nazis). Even the range of opinions on those topics often depends on the scientists' own politics as those subject to a pre-existing political filter for getting a job and/or their ongoing fear of their social superiors not just in their particular department but in their discipline as a whole, since they have the power to make or break someone's career with their influence over who gets funded or even noticed in a way that allows them to pursue funding with any hope of success.
Personally I think people should focus on the specifics of the transfer of scientists and other figures from post-war Germany and the historical context for it, such as the role of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta as an internationally-recognized sovereign state and how the Vatican later charted a course away from that sort of rightist stealth activity, while much of SMOM's top leadership and its majority non-clerical membership appointed itself as the eternal guardian of the Third Reich's legacy and remains so to this day as the current Pope attempts to dismantle that leadership and its influence, but I also know that's just me harping on my pet topics and it's not a big deal really.
i met some friends yesterday. someone mentioned the stuxnet virus. someone else countered that to minimize the risk of external hacking threats, the 'kgb' reverted to using typewriters. this didn't seem right to me. he showed me a report in telegraph from 4 years ago. All western press agencies had picked up this story from an announcement on the state procurement agency's website asking for twenty electric typewriters. however, russia today's source said "that all Russian special services have always used typewriters. it was simply time to buy new ones because the old equipment was out of date." two things:
1. the Russian secret service didn't revert to typewriters - they had never computerized core communication to begin with.
2. the typewriters are not a defense against external hacking but internal leaks. as cars points out, its hard to rid digital documents of markers that lead back to the source of leak. in the case of typewriters, its almost impossible since every document can be linked back to the particular machine based on patterns in the type/print.
One of the most common tropes in US media is that the US military always goes to war reluctantly—and, if there are negative consequences, like civilian deaths, it’s simply a matter of bumbling around without much plan or purpose.
This framing serves to flatter two sensibilities: one right and one vaguely left. It satisfies the right-wing nationalist idea that America only goes to war because it’s compelled to by forces outside of its own control; the reluctant warrior, the gentle giant who will only attack when provoked to do so. But it also plays to a nominally liberal, hipster notion that the US military is actually incompetent and boobish, and is generally bad at war-making.
*thinking really deeply*
They campaigned for him as a prisoner of conscience in 1998 and have towed his line in his war against Syria.
To talk a bit more about AI:
AI Israel was set up in the 60s by the Israeli gov to criticise neighbouring Arab countries
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.777770?v=3EF7C371B9A7C2DCC6E0D667EB65BFE2
In 2011 AI Africa sent a secret USAID funded delegation to Eritrea explicitly to Stoke color revolution there:
https//docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tesfanews.net%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Famnesty-conspiracy-against-eritrea.pdf&hl&chrome=true
A collection of AI dirt that needs to be updated with more if u have any
https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/8ce1eb99c588e0fde0b68c641a1a5df8/test/index.html
tears posted:opiate addiction in iran has risen constantly since the US invasion and occupation of afganistan, huh
*thinking really deeply*
must be doctors overprescribing opiates and absolutely nothing else
https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/straw-sage-the-shtickless-shtick-perception-management-of-leonard-cohen/
which may have been linked earlier in the thread
For my part i think the main difference between cohen and someone like zappa is that cohen owns
swampman posted:
if you read all 18 or so chapters mirrored on this site, there are another six or seven in his book which is on libgen lol. his favorite band of the era seems to be love, so i trust him completely.
