lenochodek posted:so there was this big article by buzzfeed + the kathmandu post about how WWF are using violent methods to achieve their "anti poaching" aims across the globe
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-nature-parks-torture-death
Shikharam was in too much pain to swallow. He crawled toward Hira, his thin body covered in bruises, and told her through sobs that forest rangers were torturing him. “They beat him mercilessly and put saltwater in his nose and mouth,” Hira later told police.
The rangers believed that Shikharam helped his son bury a rhinoceros horn in his backyard. They couldn’t find the horn, but they threw Shikharam in their jail anyway, court documents filed by the prosecution show.
Nine days later, he was dead.
but who is Shikharam Chaudhary?
It's suggested he is associated with the Nepalese Maoist movement (the incident occured in 2006 when nepal was still a monarchy):
https://reliefweb.int/report/nepal/report-human-rights-situation-during-period-ceasefire-between-governments-nepal-cpnFrom monitoring & investigation, it is found that the Maoist has been continued to murder after kidnapping, torture, got to be present in their own name of Peoples' Court by forcedly, get to pay donation etc. From the state, it is found that six people were killed by firing of Nepal Army in the joint security camp situated at Belbari, Morang, the death of one person in the custody of Chitawan National Park because of torture after arrested in the accussion of steeling the horn of rhino (Khag)
buzzfeed's interpretation:When forest rangers locked up Shikharam in June 2006, park authorities were scrambling to curb the poaching that spiked alongside social unrest during the country’s Maoist insurgency. They managed to save more rhinos the following year — but the success came at a cost.
the kathmandu post concludes this:
http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2019-03-03/nepals-park-officials-who-beat-and-tortured-a-man-were-rewarded-by-the-government-and-the-world-wide-fund-for-nature.htmlWWF staff in Nepal lobbied for the release of park officials charged with Shikharam’s murder, later hiring one of the main accused and awarding the second. In India, the office signed off on the controversial “kill the unwanted” policy proposal at a park where rangers went on to kill dozens of people.
the whole KP article is worth reading:What’s largely been left out of this narrative of Nepal’s success in conservation is the adverse impact it has had on the lives of the indigenous people who live in the areas surrounding the conservation zones. A majority of them were uprooted from their homes as a direct result of their ancestral lands being designated a national park.
When the country’s first national park was created in Chitwan, the Tharu people, who had been living in the area for centuries, were forced to relocate outside the park’s boundaries. Their access to the forest, the community’s primary source of survival, was swiftly restricted and their activities began to be strictly monitored.
Over the years, the Tharus and other indigenous groups living around the park have also been subject to abuse and torture at the hands of park authorities and Nepal Army soldiers who jointly patrol the park.
Villagers have reported being verbally and physically harassed, having their goods confiscated on false charges, and being handed severe punishments for minor infractions.
A 2010 UN report documented six murders committed by army personnel patrolling national parks around Nepal. In one incident, soldiers shot and killed two indigenous women and a 12-year-old girl while they were gathering tree bark inside Bardia National Park. The Nepal Army accused them of being poachers and claimed they had fired shots in retaliation.
The UN report found that the army had “played an active role in obstructing criminal accountability,” by falsifying and destroying evidence and pressuring the families of the victims to withdraw criminal complaints. The report also said that with each murder, the parks falsely claimed the victims were poachers.
Then, we hear about one arms deal where the problem is not the weapons traffic, but only that someone is embezzling funds through them:One former WWF employee in CAR told BuzzFeed News he was recruited to help “camouflage the deal because none of our funders were permitted to buy weapons.”
But as he examined the invoices, he noticed that the numbers didn’t add up. In an email, he prodded Jean Bernard Yarissem, WWF’s top official in the country, for more detail. An AK assault rifle “should cost us” 266,666 Central African francs (around $615), the employee wrote, “so for 15” weapons “it reaches 4 million.” If so, he wrote, that would leave about 2 million francs unaccounted for: “Does that mean that two boxes of ammunition cost 1 million each?”
Soon it all unraveled. Yarissem explained what happened in a reply to an email sent to nine other officials under the subject line “scandale.” Members of the CAR army had “embezzled” funds meant for arms and ammunition. (The CAR government did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yarissem wrote he was upset the money from the deal had gone missing. Yet he betrayed no misgivings about purchasing the guns, which he referred to as “the weapons that we possess.”
...
After that deal went awry, the charity’s staff in CAR did not appear to shy away from involvement with weapons. The charity bought food and fuel for soldiers deployed on an anti-poaching mission during the peak of the country’s civil war, according to two former staffers who spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity. One former WWF staffer said he had personally taught rangers how to safely handle AK-47s and how to conduct defensive combat tactics.
"A global spymaster"WWF’s war on poaching extends beyond its support for boots-on-the-ground patrols. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal the charity has assumed the role of a global spymaster in its efforts to protect wildlife.
...
But WWF has been deeply involved in the controversial practice for some time. The charity has helped establish informant networks in authoritarian states, documents show, and it has handed over intelligence to rangers and soldiers accused of human rights abuses.
Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show WWF has offered staffers detailed instructions for finding and cultivating informants, who “help to solve crimes.”
sounds like more than fervent anti-poaching gone out of hand to me..
That is very interesting. Incidentally, I note that in a recent Australian parliamentary committee review of national security legislation and proposals for new espionage offences, third parties raising 'serious' concerns about the breadth of espionage offences included law associations, civil liberties councils, human rights orgs (including the likes of HRW)... and WWF Australia, for some reason. Really the only group mentioned that isn't on its face directly concerned with law or political rights, sticks out like a sore thumb
The hoarseness of his voice and the whole scene is extremely haunting to me, and should be to anyone imo regardless of what you think of him personally
drwhat posted:the guy who helped put a bunch of terrible shit online that was inconvenient for a ton of western capitalist countries and had to hide in an ecuadorian embassy about it was accused of sexual assault, there was a bunch of media attention about it, then the charges were withdrawn, and you are like yes thumbs up hang the bastard rapist.
It's tempting to spend a bunch of time and energy nitpicking that because it gets really basic stuff like the sequence of events wrong, but the important thing is that the charges of sexual assault and rape were perfectly credible (and not even all withdrawn - one of the main charges expired because he waited it out). To believe his accusers you simply have to accept that assange is the kind of man who would be sexually aggressive towards women and ignore their conditions for consent. To believe his version of events you have to accept that the women in question were "honeypots" in a country beholden to "crazed radical feminist ideology" (direct quotes). Obviously the charges were pursued as a pretext for making him vulnerable to US extradition demands but that hardly disproves the allegations or excuses his behaviour.
I explicitly said I don't celebrate the yanks getting hold of him. I oppose his extradition to the US as a matter of principle. He is nonetheless a huge piece of shit and I don't have to pretend to sympathise with him
I would be very surprised & sad if Julian is handed over to the US. For me this was never about anything else than his misconduct against me/women and his refusal to take responsibility for this. Too bad my case could never be investigated properly, but it’s already been closed.
— Anna Ardin (@therealardin) April 11, 2019
One more thing: I can rescue the cat.
— Anna Ardin (@therealardin) April 11, 2019
Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia ()
At the time, the main focus for activity at TRS was bullying nerds in the Republican Party and its organs like National Review who found Trump skeevy -- Yiannopolous' only real talent (it certainly wasn't the singing) was generating these kinds of online mobs -- as well as amplifying white nationalist messages online, spreading them to a conservative audience. At the time Yiannopolous was working directly for Steve Bannon. Once in the White House, a TRS podcaster would say on his program that Bannon was giving their movement "space to destroy." This strategy of tension rolled out with a series of escalating demonstrations culminating in the rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, which began with a neo-Nazi mob equipped with torches brutalizing a group of peaceful demonstrators -- who were lucky not to have gotten lynched on the spot.
The point of a strategy of tension being a government -- or elements within a government -- sponsoring terror attacks and other measures (violence, intimidation, etc.) by non-state groups to provoke political opponents into radicalizing to a degree that they can be better marginalized and suppressed by state forces. Fascists are natural (bribed) recruits for this, as fascist violence seeks to both challenge a state's monopoly on the use of force while identifying with the state in a war against "subversives" and "threats to the social order" and so on. But in this case, I think the strategy largely backfired with the murder of a girl the following day and Bannon's ouster from the White House days afterward. I think one reason it failed was the strategy the antifascists used to counter the right-wing mobilization. An interview with one participant published in September 2017 stated:
I think the antifascists had a deeper understanding of diversity of tactics. The presence of counter-protestors with a personal commitment to nonviolence was important, I think, and so were the diverse approaches of those who did use physical force, I mean as far as acting more offensively or defensively.
Unite the Right was all about image. They wanted three things: they wanted to look like victims of antifa/“SJW” aggression, to look like friends of the police, and to look like they were winning the physical battle in the streets. I think all those wires got crossed in Charlottesville because of the diversity of their opposition.
As a side note, we made a conscious decision not to do Saturday in black bloc. I think that helped in those specific circumstances.
So diversity of tactics was important. A lot of these alt-right people are scared of confrontation, even though they fantasize about power. You could tell that made it hard for them to psychologically switch gears; by the time they figured out how to deal with one kind of counter-protestor, the situation had changed and they had to go back to square one. They had to think too hard. They didn’t know if they were going to get punched or prayed at. And the whole time they’re getting pelted with paint balloons, and they just look silly.
Then you had macho types who reacted to that paralysis by going ham, charging in swinging by themselves. That was scary, because these were big dudes who understood violence, but it didn’t really serve their larger goals, and they lost fights because we would surround them and beat them back. It didn’t help those guys that their official rally was up a hill behind barricades.
Incidentally, it's clear this continued to happen in Portland with a right-wing gang regularly being driven to demonstrations in the backs of squad cars -- with text messages later released under public information act requests showing the police liaison advising members of the gang on how to avoid arrest for active warrants against them. This occurred after members stomped a civilian while roving around attempting to instigate fights (the civilian pressed charges). Portland is sufficiently remote, isolated and small enough that it's also a useful testing ground for staging civil unrest scenarios using demonstrations in federally-owned parks to grant DHS policing authority and equipped with pepperball guns -- with IRL human beings as the guinea pigs.
Edited by trakfactri ()
Bannon’s job was pretty much to coordinate that centrally, except he was just a blogger so he didn’t really know how to accomplish that except to write fawning emails to his young gang of boys like a horny old grande dame.
But this is the United $nakkke$ we’re talking about, and the problem the original-hire Trump people always have with themselves is, they’re too hyper and nervous, they seem to always think what they’re doing is super unusual sneaky spy shit that will get them caught, when all they’re doing is clumsily replicating what their predecessors did more successfully through a couple more layers of plausible deniability than Trump’s people know how to maintain.
So they fired Bannon in some weird fit of attempted media management strategy, and probably the one or two administration people behind it who haven’t already lost their jobs no longer even remember why they did it.
cars posted:they’re too hyper and nervous, they seem to always think what they’re doing is super unusual sneaky spy shit
that will get them caught, when all they’re doing is clumsily replicating what their predecessors did more successfully through a couple more layers of plausible deniability than Trump’s people know how to maintain.
This is the best biography of John Bolton anyone will ever write.
Most of those original-hire people got fired because they were unstable and new to Washington and liked to blab to the media about the White House. But I don’t think Bolton really has much of a life outside of staying on message about murdering Persians and so on. Like I can imagine him thinking up rude versions of the names of second-string diplomats from Iran while he brushes his teeth before bed so he’ll have some jokes for the briefing tomorrow.
I'm also remembering how early the next year there was an aborted march by a column of gooftruppen at a Michigan college to reach their Fuhrer giving a speech while he was consigned inside a livestock pavilion way out on the ass end of campus, with wide fields of view in every direction. After they got their jimmies rustled and the donuts moved in to separate the crowds, the leader of the pack started shouting in one cop's face: "You had no plan! No plan..."
Edited by trakfactri ()
The military has known that Iran cannot be successfully attacked for like 20 years. But Reagan started some shit with Iran so bolton wants to start shit with Iran. He tells trump to go to North Korea and demand their unconditional surrender to get a peace treaty to end the war that they already won when bolton was 5.
He wants to do a coup in South America because thats just what they did in the good old days. But in practice, all HE did is have the vice president call some random loser who's literally never held a job and ask him to just call himself president despite having no support from the military or police, or never having been heard of by anyone at all. And that weakass clipboard "secret message" thing alone puts him in that box. That was the very first thing I thought of when you mentioned that these people all think they're doing secret spy shit. And the instant it ran into trouble, it became clear there was no plan, there was no building of support, it was just exactly what it looked like. Every step they take is countered before it starts because the whole world has seen his tired shit before.
Bolton is a relic without a clue who genuinely thinks he's extremely clever, and is trying to relive the good old days by just doing all the same old trash like kissinger did, except all the CIA/State dept staffers with really heavy german accents that did all the months of ground work for the coups and shit are all really old and retired.
trakfactri posted:The point of a strategy of tension being a government -- or elements within a government -- sponsoring terror attacks and other measures (violence, intimidation, etc.) by non-state groups to provoke political opponents into radicalizing to a degree that they can be better marginalized and suppressed by state forces.
On Friday, the day when you drop news that you want everyone to forget about over the weekend, a bunch of nazis posted videos of themselves kidnapping asylum seekers at gunpoint on the southern border. By Monday the FBI had arrested their leader.
But the complaint for which they arrested him was from a 2017 """""""anonymous tip""""" that the guy was training to assassinate obama and soros which is about as realistic and threatening as saying they also want to ambush santa claus for socialistically giving toys to poor and nonwhite kids.
The FBI had sent FBI agents to this guys house 2 years ago and had a 4 hour conversation and he literally showed them all his guns but said they really belonged to his girlfriend (wink wink). And the FBI sat on that for years while they openly continued arming, training, collaborating with the border patrol, sharing videos of themselves assaulting latino migrants, and using all of the above for fundraising. Then very next workday after they made the news, arrested one single geriatric on a technical violation for having a gun after a felony conviction (which was itself just for "having a gun in a place that considers that a felony").
There can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever that every single step this militia was taking was with the full knowledge and consent of federal law enforcement. Until they made it to headlines. And following from that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume the same isn't true about the rest.
wasted posted:Google Deepmind is an attempt to automate US military strategy and I find that hilarious.
Just in time for Buttman.
MarxUltor posted:The Venezuela coup perfectly matches Bolton to that assessment of trump's people. He really really wants to be kissinger but doesn't actually know how to accomplish anything because he literally has never had to Do A Thing in his entire life. His resume is just lawyer/nazi think tank/assistant secretary of bureacracy.
i am pretty hesitant to remove Venezuelans from an explanation of what happened in Venezuela. Like, I think there was probably more going on there than the relative competence of all-powerful United States overlords.
Petrol posted:I am afraid this might be missing the mark somewhat. He makes a very important point when he says the resignation felt towards Facebook's domination isn't real, but I think the solution is not to build a "facebook killer" alternative social network. This has been tried many times, incorporating the kinds of ideas he mentions (like open source alternatives that are decentralised rather than relying on monolithic corporate servers), but of course it always fails because there is nothing motivating the average person to shift from a network that all their friends and family use to one that's empty.
Instead I think the solution lies in moving past this poisonous 'social network' phase in the short history of the internet. I don't know how, or how quickly, this could happen, but I see a contest between Facebook's ability to build hooks into people's lives (by trying to replace the functionality of important personal things like photo albums and home movies) and its nature as a plodding behemoth that constantly needs to squeeze money out of users and their data. The latter is more likely than anything to make people get jack of platforms like this and just go back to living a real life with real personal connections, free of ads that pop up every time they try to look at a video of their friend's cat or baby or whatever. Facebook's very nature will likely be its undoing. One can only hope, anyway, because I can't think of anything proactive people can do apart from deleting their own accounts.
I like this place because I can go back and read old, interesting posts. Anyways, I'm reminded here of this video of Laura Loomer recently going into hysterics on the Alex Jones Show because she was banned from one of these social media sites (she has been banned from many). I think the reason was the equivalent of mod sass where she'd show up to the CEO's house with a bullhorn. "My life is ruined!"
I saw this at the time and didn't think much of it; more just part of the everyday spectacle, but now I believe she really does imagine her life is ruined. I hesitate to say the right is "better" at social media though, instead the Alex Jones Show and so many right-wing sites are just more easily compatible with prerogatives of passive consumption, "marathon livestreams" -- the QAnon conspiracy subculture is really built around that -- and commodifying and monetizing as many aspects of social life as possible. They can't self-generate a praxis outside of it. They come up with all kinds of self-regarding theories about how they're telling truth to power because they're getting banned, but that's just a contradiction in the growth model resolving itself. From the CEO of Twitter's perspective he's just keeping the mod sass under control.
--
Anyways, Petrol the links in the (excellent) OP look broken. I was going to get my hands on some of them by looking around Scribd since many seem to be on there anyways though.
Also -- I've found a researcher who is doing work on the connection between the U.S. govt, the Republican Party, and Ukrainian fascist emigres and paramilitary youth camps (existing today) in the USA:
(THREAD) Did you know? John A. Armstrong, whose 1955 book "Ukrainian Nationalism" remains the foundational history of the OUN/UPA, thanked the following Ukrainian Nazi collaborators & war criminals and German pals of theirs among "those persons … most helpful" to its production. pic.twitter.com/MbLrrURRUV
— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) December 28, 2018
Introducing the Ukrainian Youth Association of America (CYM-A), an old crypto-fascist cult under the heavy influence of the "Bandera movement" since 1946. The OUN-B & its partisan army, the UPA, collaborated with the Nazis during WW2 & the Holocaust —"heroes" according to CYM-A. pic.twitter.com/BPzEPzKV9x
— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) May 17, 2019
Edited by trakfactri ()
Ukrainian American youth marching around the CYM camp in Baraboo, Wisconsin (2012), where the memory and legacy of western Ukraine's Nazi collaborators has been celebrated for decades. pic.twitter.com/FRD7KOhqTM
— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) May 17, 2019
The same town flashed into the news in 2018 because the high school graduating class did this:
Same people? Dunno -- the camp draws Ukrainian-American youth from Chicago and Milwaukee and other cities every summer. In the video, they're saluting busts of Stepan Bandera, Simon Petliura and Roman Shukhevych among others. Shukhevych was a captain in Special Group Nachtigall which were sent by Bandera's OUN to receive training and equipment in Germany before Operation Barbarossa.
Edited by trakfactri ()
One of the odd side stories is that Guo sued Roger Stone for defamation last year after Stone appeared on the Alex Jones Show and alleged Guo funneled money to Hillary Clinton and Steve Bannon. Jones predictably presented the whole thing as a Chinese intelligence plot to subvert the MAGA (Guo is, by the way, a member of the Mar-a-Lago Club). Stone settled the suit and apologized. Anyways, Guo and Bannon are pretty tight:
Guo is pretty weird, though, and he comes across as an egomaniac who has trouble controlling the volume of his own voice so his appearances are really demagogic and screamy. I think this makes him difficult to market to American bourg like Khodorkovsky, so he's more incidentally useful selling the U.S. government line on the CCP to Chinese-speaking expats on YouTube.
His videos are fun to look through. There's one which appears to be in East Texas of him shooting a minigun with a bunch of ex-military-looking guys:
The photo below has a guy wearing a logo that appears to read "CRAF." Civil Reserve Air Fleet?
There's also this guy:
Took me a minute to track down that logo but it's a Dallas-based company called:
My guess is this goofball hired them for KRE (kidnapping, ransom and extortion) insurance because he's worried about getting nabbed by the Chinese government. A lot of focus on high-end executive protection. Here's a brochure if you'd like to read it: https://docdro.id/Q3odMSu
Populares posted:Reminds me of those survivalist billionaires who don't realize as soon as they reach the bunker they're dead and their bodyguards are taking over their last remnant of privilege.
it's like, Bitch where do you think your pilot is going to fly that helicopter you bought when they start shooting senators? To your house to get your dog's special hairbrush?
i'm so curious about this 48-hour period, starting with a surprise promotion at lackland airforce base and ending with meeting the secretary of homeland security, with presumably some sort of interfacing with the cia in the time inbetween pic.twitter.com/WgSYFX4GoZ
— testing testing (@mechaniquette) January 22, 2018
Sunday posted:who are we to judge love?
The loudspeaker spoke up and said ...
The loudspeaker spoke up and said ...
The loudspeaker spoke up and said ...
Social media is stupid. Social media is stupid.
Social media's stupid. Social media is stupid.
Social media is stupid. Social media is stupid.
Social media's stupid. Social media is stupid.
Communism is good. Communism is good.
Communism is good. Communism is good.
(Did you hear that?)
Give up.
(Did you hear that?)
Give up. Give up. Give up! Give up!
Social media is stupid. Social media is stupid.
Social media's stupid. Social media is stupid.
Give up. Give up. Give up.
(Communism is good.)
(Communism is good.)
Social media's stupid.
(Communism is good.)
Social media's st