Would you debate with a Nazi?

Trump seems likely to win the election, with many outlets already calling his victory. If that's the case, Israel will step up the genocide, and get more support. They will probably act even more aggressively and take further territories in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and continue to obliterate Gaza, while also attacking Syria, Iran, Yemen and Lebanon.

It's even possible a global war will erupt as the US could attack Iran.

Dark days indeed.

OWNED

The United Puppets of America

The video posted explains the war mongers thoughts and how he wants to deal with the Palestinians. He also says that the United States are very easy to sway. He has literally made a speech to congress back in 2002 (https://youtu.be/d_PDpwL8kuY?si=xJ-Bufs5v4XKHhsJ) talking about the positive reverberations that will take place in the Middle East if the u tied states takes Saddam out. We all know how that turned out.

Let’s look at other facts. How in the world,did Israeli intelligence services miss an attack of this scale completely? They literally have spies and informants everywhere,particularly in Palestinian Territories. Apparently Egypt had warned them 10 days ago that something big was coming. Let’s not forgot that Netanyahu was facing historic protests due to his judicial reforms which was causing a huge schism within Israeli society. Nobody will be talking about those reforms for a while now.

He has gotten exactly what he wanted,to butcher more Palestinians and steal more land and build more illegal settlements.

IF the dems lose in November. It will be because of their own capitalist intransigence. If they win, breathe a sigh of relief by all means. If they lose, no surprised pikachu faces allowed. There should be no question that it is at the party that your anger should be directed.

I see a lot of people, whether they be jaded nihilists or more insidious counter intelligence scum trying to manipulate popular sentiment on this sub into not voting in the upcoming election, acting like Harris is equivalent to Trump just because she's about as bad as Biden when it comes to Israel. This is not and has never been a position endorsed by Chomsky, and anyone espousing that view on a subreddit called r/Chomsky should maybe reevaluate why they even want to participate on this sub at all if their views are so poorly aligned with the man whose ideas this subreddit is meant to foster and promote. Kindly go create your own sub for counter-intelligence trolls and Trump bots.

As Chomsky always said, activism is the real politics. An election happens every once in a while and takes a couple minutes. The real work and the real politics will be forcing Harris towards the positions we want her to adopt through action and protest. Not acting too cool for school by just not voting because choosing the fucked up but not catastrophic candidate somehow taints us with her uncoolness.

You've probably seen the news, the rhetoric pouring out. People being compared to animals, the jingoism of many Israeli politicians and citizens, the bombings, the rumors of a ground invasion. I can't help but recall this video (link) from 2017, where a journalist asked Israelis on the street about their views on the Palestinian people. Israeli citizens casually expressed their moderate opinions that the Palestinians should be carpet bombed, that Islam "is a disease", that they need to kill or expel the Arabs, that Palestinians shouldn't be treated with because they "can't be trusted", etc.

Calls for an aggressive military response are echoed all throughout Western media and politics. Recent news clips seem to show many Israelis actually pleased at the buildup of troops, not just because of the heightened security, but I presume because there's a feeling of national injustice and unity resulting from the recent attacks by Hamas, and an eagerness for retribution. I was too young to remember it myself, but I feel there are many uncanny parallels between this, and the ignorant, hawkish attitudes about terrorism that preceded the disastrous Iraq War.

Not only is the violence shocking, the entire situation feels like a fever dream, for many reasons. It's hard to believe that, for example, France banned all protest in support of Palestine. Even if you disagreed with the protests, how is such a policy even possible in a presumably democratic, free society?

There's obviously no parity in power or security between Israel and Palestine, yet we are supposed to quietly condone this sophisticated military occupation cutting the power to hospitals, in a city that is virtually caged in? Gaza's sewage and water systems are demolished and they are reliant on aid for survival and yet we cannot speak of their plight or be harshly criticized?

It's almost comical: read this headline I just pulled from the Jerusalem Post: "Cutting off electricity and water to Gaza: Ethical or excessive?" Infants will predictably die because their incubators will fail, children on life support will die, civilians will suffer and die of disease and dehydration, and we presume to talk about ethics? Such headlines can be found everywhere.

I want to know your thoughts, specifically pertaining to the question (title), but feel free to weigh in about the matter more generally. This is a Chomsky sub, so please feel free to share relevant quotes, excerpts, etc. from him, and other critics of US foreign policy and the occupation.

(I wrote this post in March and posted it on . However, a few people messaged me to say that the  moderators took it down last week, though I'm not sure why. Given the flood of divisive, gender-war posts we've seen in the past five days, and several countries' demonstrated use of gender-war propaganda to fuel political division in multiple countries, I felt it was important to repost this. This post was written for a U.S. audience, but the implications are increasingly global.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online.  But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users. 

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States 

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA.  Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men.  According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit."  It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers.  It serves two purposes:  Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.  

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.  

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement.  Per the Times:

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest:  They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite.  Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour.  That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked:  They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization. 

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes.  It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.   

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

As the New York Times reported in 2022, 

China is joining in with AI

Last month, the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign.  "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S.  The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake.  Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika.  Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts?  By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem.  Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news.  Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme. 

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling.  Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel.  And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.  

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them.  And it's not just low-quality bots.  Per RAND,

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed.  It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions. 

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms.  And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real. 

So what can you do?  To quote WarGames:  The only winning move is not to play.  The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users.  Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

• Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know.  Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform.  Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths.  Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.  
• Resist groupthink.  A key element of manipulate networks is volume.  People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support.  When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right.  But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think.  They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.
• Don't let social media warp your view of society.  This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable.  If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media.  It is not always right.  Sometimes, it screws up.  But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

original post by u/walkandtalkk

From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

https://nader.org/2024/03/05/stop-the-worsening-undercount-of-palestinian-casualties-in-gaza/

I'll preface this by saying that I am the farthest thing from a "hater" or someone who has any interest in smearing Noam Chomsky. I first encountered Chomsky's ideas when I watched his interview with Evan Solomon on CBC. As a preteen who deeply despised George W Bush and thought the US invasion of Iraq was one of the most heinous, despicable acts in history, when I saw Noam methodically take down every argument out of Evan's mouth, a journalist who my entire family respected, I instantly wanted to read and listen to as much of his ideas as possible. I think his contribution with Edward Herman is his most important political and cultural contribution, as the propaganda model described in Manufacturing Consent essentially gives the reader after completion of the book a powerful tool to aid in dissecting bias, and corruption, in society. I generally refrain from calling people I have never met a "hero". I consider my grandparents, my parents, my sister and some of my friends as my heroes. Noam Chomsky is one of the very few others I consider my personal hero as well.

That being said, Noam is fundamentally wrong in saying his association with Epstein is "none of our business". I'm not going to lay out all of the evidence in this post, the Ghislaine Maxwell/ Robert Maxwell connection, Les Wexner, Prince Andrew/ the Royal Family/ Jimmy Savile, Harvey Weinstein and Black Cube. Too much is circumstantial and requires a real criminal investigation, that let's be real, any intelligent person should understand is never going to happen. Epstein was working for intelligence, most likely elements of the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. If you're going to hand wave away that claim as "conspiracy theory", than you've either a) not looked at all of the material on the subject or b) are not an intelligent individual or c) are a bad faith actor. If your take on Epstein is anything other than "this guy was an intelligence operative who was using sex slaves to blackmail powerful and influential people", then your take is going to age like milk.

If Epstein was working on behalf of an organized syndicate of criminality to blackmail powerful and influential people with sex slaves, then this is a matter of public interest. It absolutely, unequivocally is the public business to investigate these crimes and seek answers from his associates.

Everything Chomsky is doing in regards to this matter is wrong. If you were involved with someone who was doing the things the Epstein was doing, took money from this person, had meetings with them, wouldn't you voluntarily go to the police to give a statement? Wouldn't you denounce this person so people don't think you were somehow involved? To be as tone deaf as to say "it's none of your business" while the public hasn't even grasped the tip of the iceberg of Epstein crimes, even just what we know on record is completely inhumane and despicable.

Noam is a self described anarchist as well. What kind of anarchist gets on a private jet to go fraternize at the multi million dollar NYC townhouse of a convicted pedophile?

There's no denying this man's work in regards to linguistic, politics, metaphysics and human rights. Which is also why his refusal to clarify his meetings with Epstein is so baffling. To say "he did the crime and did the time, clean slate". As if a man as intelligent as Noam Chomsky could seriously believe Epstein had a fair trial and was truly served justice. This is the same man who has claimed every US president should be hung if held to the Nuremberg standard.

I really don't know what else to say.

Recently Israel officially announced that it is fully ethnically cleansing and destroying Northern Gaza. There was hardly any discussion of this massive piece of news.

Now Smotrich has announced that Israel is officially annexing the West Bank. And the reaction: crickets

It is thanks to the incoming Trump administration that Israel acts with such utter impunity. The media goes along with them.

Only independent minds, media and activists can put a stop to this imperial madness. We are going to have to work harder than ever before.

I intended to write this yesterday but hesitated because I aim to steer clear of signals that could exacerbate 'identity-based racism,' or perhaps contribute to the perpetuation of the clash between Westerners and Easterners, a notion I find disconcerting. But!... If Western aid workers who were being killed by IDF were Arab/Muslim instead of British/Polish/UK/American, the media would not outrage or question Israel as much. Most people might not even hear or read about it, and it wouldn't receive as much coverage. I've noticed similar occurrences in the last five months. This media theme is prevalent, and it's evident across many media outlets. Sympathy seems to be reserved only for 'Westerners'. I'm not intentionally diminishing the bravery and nobility of those martyr aid workers, the 'Westerners,' working in these areas, something I might not dare to do. There's a significant sacrifice in entering such military zones. However, it's undeniable that sympathy and media attention vary based on one's ethnicity, skin color, and religion.

Each of my threads on r/Genz gets deleted, despite the presence of a specific political flair. Today, I asked a straightforward question about the right to live in one's home, and it was also removed. It seems that discussing Palestinian politics is practically impossible on a majority portion of this platform.