(The invasion - the thread itself is fine.)
swampman posted:
wow you're not kidding. this image should win a Pulitzer, I've never seen anything capture 21st century imperialist propaganda so well 
swampman posted:
Yeah if that's not an edit, (not accusing at all, just cautious) that needs to be widely distributed. It's literally war is peace bullshit. It's breathtaking.
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:I doubt it's intentional. It's probably a product of very effective branding so that near 100% of indexed content prefers the term intervention over invasion after "libya", since that euphemism has been in place since 2011. Does that make it less creepy, methink no
exactly it's a system of propaganda which is completely self-perpetuating and removed from morality or intent. like googling the Ukrainian resistance brings up 'pro-russian separatists' and 'pro-russian unrest'. of course the media propaganda that made these the acceptable terms is pure manufacturing consent but social media removes this intentionality and replaces them with algorithms and upvoting. facebook, google, reddit, wikipedia are incapable of creating new knowledge, they simply circulate propaganda that already exists and give them the illusion of neutrality. I find it fascinating while understanding it has no real influence beyond people who aren't D&D type 'politics nerds'
on the intervention thing, i think the whole concept of a "'no-fly zone' is not invasion" to be pretty interesting, given that moden warfare is based on air supremacy (i think?)
also, fun fact: the wikkki article isn't capitalized, which is weird
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya )
Themselves posted:bhp: non politics nerds know that putin is "the bad man" though, and russia doing "bad stuff", right? like facebook/reddit propaganda and frames extend further than just d&d nerds i would think, or maybe you're talking about something more specific...
on the intervention thing, i think the whole concept of a "'no-fly zone' is not invasion" to be pretty interesting, given that moden warfare is based on air supremacy (i think?)
also, fun fact: the wikkki article isn't capitalized, which is weird
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya )
I guess you're right. I'm not sure social media participation is 'politics', in the sense that politics is an empty signifier and that participation in these 'politics' is structurally indistinguishable from participation in any other empty signifier (being a goon for example). but in that case everyone is a 'politics nerd' in that politics is another fetishized commodity rather than an essential Schmittian primordial rupture between communities or Gramscian ideological mystification of the bourgeois rupture of state and civil society.
Or, as Hiroki Azuma says about Japan: "since the cold war, it could be said that right wing Japanese discourse has generally survived by allowing itself to become subculturalized, falsified, and otaku-ized" (Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, p. 24)
But clearly the foundation of this politics-nerd structure has 'political' value for the bourgeoisie in the way star wars canon has profitability value for Disney even if the self-perpetuation of the structure is out of their control. And in that sense one could say that reddit memes are politics that reaffirm bourgeois propaganda about Russia even if the mechanism of their self-perpetuation is not really political but is pure commodity consumption (and thus no longer contains anti-capitalist potential). just rando thoughts
swampman posted:I doubt it's intentional. It's probably a product of very effective branding so that near 100% of indexed content prefers the term intervention over invasion after "libya", since that euphemism has been in place since 2011. Does that make it less creepy, methink no
cars posted:haha hey guys great news the Syrian civil war
ended in December 2013 after all check it out
the chosen worldwide organ to promote forever war floated some trial balloons this week for massive new u.s. bombing campaigns in libya to "stop ISIS" with the aid of the usual suspects.
for reference here is the extent of isis control in libya according to another wretchedly spook-service-influenced source:
...although i don't expect that map to look like that for long because it's too close to reality to suit the narrative. isis is that grey sliver up on the coast there.
so what's going on is, the brotherhood-heavy post-Qaddafi government in tripoli became ornery enough for the cia to inject America's Pal "General" Khalifa Haftar back into the situation. haftar is this one weird guy who rose to prominence in qaddafi's government, then in a western-backed coup attempt against qaddafi, until the u.s. government cut a deal to release him in 1990 (because they love freedom). following that business he moved to the united states, specifically just up the road from CIA headquarters, where he lived a life of apparent luxury with no known source of personal income for 20 years. after helping the united states fuck up the country in 2011, haftar jetted back to the u.s., where he holds citizenship. there he no doubt associated with only Completely Innocuous Americans until summoned again through the combined powers of western foreign intelligence like the captain planet of shit & piss that he is.
haftar's Mo came around again in 2014, when he was deployed to shore up a new anti-tripoli rump parliament in the country that declared the government in tripoli null & void and held new elections that only involved 18% of the country's electorate (vs. 60% for the tripoli parliament) as voting just had to be suppressed in certain regions for "security" purposes... my stars... the wikipedia pages for this shit are an absolute nightmare, just massive blocks of text explaining that the gov't in tripoli is hitler, stalin and not the sort of people who get really into sex & the city. the 18-percenter Tobruk government is also described, in a scrupulously minimal page on Wikipedia, as simply "the parliament of Libya"..oooookay.....
anyway this is spinning up as another opportunity for the u.s. to wage proxy war against potential challengers for king fuck of fuck rock so we know what that means, it means isis is on the move! and somehow got its hands on a bunch of the same word-of-mouth-transmitted "mustard gas" that assad supposedly blasted all over syria while screaming "this makes no sense, i want to die, please come shoot me and bomb me" & weeping uncontrollably.
even the nyt is a little skittish on this shit because the u.s. military claims its source was part of saddam hussein's chemical weapons program, and if you do the math on the back of a wawa receipt it turns out that the supposed isis mustard gas mastermind would have been a teenager at the time the u.s. is claiming that he was part of the inner circle of iraqi weapons division, sort of a wolfgang amadeus mozart of weapons research i suppose...... i know you're thinking, well, has Teen Vogue got a hold of this uplifting story of achievement and the answer is yes fucker yes indeed.
in the story linked above, the N.Y. Crimes hastens to add that according to some guy who shouted up through a storm drain to them outside the jefferson memorial, the testimony of Captain Weird Science here led the u.s. government to bomb not one, not three, but two places, which means he's legit because otherwise the u.s. government may have bombed someplace based on bullshit which is flat out impossible. Chears
i can understand why/how isis in iraq morphed from ex-sadam officers in their hometown areas. and i have seen the reactionary media is saying its the same phenomenon in gadaffis home town.
but the character and direction of the libyan revolution was quite different from sadams counterrevolution (i need to learn more about this however)
so i suspect isis have been planted there to punish and destroy libyan people who might act against imperialism and for revolution. unfortunately i know nothing tho!
chickeon posted:maybe the same reason why 20,000 mixed ISIS and AQ uniforms(?) were being shipped together to the maghreb from europe
just some average alis planning to make a buck in the marketplace of ideas
liberals i talked with on- and offline during those intervening years were almost always viciously unaware of the spook aspect. they reacted to the 100% undeniable, un-denied statement that half the americans who died that night were guns for hire working out of a secret CIA black ops base not even connected to the State Dept. building, and that the then-revealed CIA "annex" was where most of the action took place, like i had told them the Greys did 9/11. i would text them the CSM article from the day after & so on, then they quickly rationalized that it wasn't important because they didn't know about it. but probably at some point they did because they're "news junkies". my point is less the memory hole and more that the reputation-dogging in the Washington press means that every time something spooky happens, some of the sleep-deprived inferiority complexes at the big D.C. news outlets always end up focusing on the most important elements by accident before quickly backing off from them, while never actually denying them.
with haftar, the same thing happened. in 2011 a few articles tried to get the jump on tomorrow's story by noting that this guy lived in one of the priciest areas of the country next door to the spookiest place on earth for two solid decades. when he showed up again in 2014 there were even some folks implying he was a warlord and the biggest problem in Libya. now he's a "general" again, defending a fantasy-football "democratic" government, just like Musharraf became a "president" to the NYT for purposes of shredding weddings and daycare centers with killer robots.
currently there are a few bits here, there & everywhere about how Dr. Isis would have been hiding his jack off rags from mom and dad when the U.S. says he was running super-secret chemical laboratories for Saddam Hussein, but soon that fact will be found only within paywall-protected Foreign Policy fart pieces. so in the end, most of the shit i know about any of this comes from the exact same sources as anyone else reading english off a screen, it's just rude to talk about it later like it got a bunch of people killed or something.