FB Posting for January 13, 2021
I , Eric Edward Johansson, Progressive member of the Green Party who believes in equality for all in addition to my belief in a range of various Libertarian viewpoints do hereby claim and openly admit to being a domestic terrorist. I intend to keep doing my domestic terrorism that I call “antiwar activism” and I dare the federal government to do a goddamn thing about it. I am a word terrorist and I’m a proud word terrorist at that. I post lots of articles and ideas that some find offensive and others may call “fake news.” Furthermore, since my calls for speaking out and direct action intend to compel the government to change its policy or else risk the consequences of not doing thus using fear as a tool to compel government actions, this makes every social media post of mine a direct violation of the US Patriot Act and of the US Espionage Act----two laws I am happy to violate openly and violate as often as possible------again, I dare the government or their corporate minions to do anything about it. Yes, I am giving you the middle finger. Whatcha going to do about it?
As a card carrying member of the ACLU, I proudly support every Amendment of the Bill of Rights including the right to bear arms and especially the First Amendment which is first because it is the most important amendment of them all. I sincerely hope the Conservative Right will sue the pants off Twitter and Amazon and YouTube because I for one will completely support their legal efforts to overturn the push from the tech sector and some quarters of partisan Left to curtail Free Speech. When a private company enters the public sphere, it agrees to a particular compact between its right to do business and the people's right not be discriminated against------so just as it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals or African-Americans so is it also wrong to discriminate against ideologies or those who hold different political viewpoints. Discrimination is wrong, period, no matter who is being discriminated against.
Like it or not, lying and fake news and hate speech are all examples of First Amendment protected Free Speech. Both the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan possess the right to express themselves and their filth freely, like it or not. Any attempt to curtail their speech only results in curtailing the Free Speech of us all. The way to defeat hate speech and fake news and lying is with more speech, a lot more speech against it and by using our critical thinking skills to weigh and decide on our own and never by censorship. Censorship is the highway to fascism. This is why it is extraordinarily ironic that recent calls to censor in the name of stopping fascism is, ironically, the very tool that will actually enable it.
"All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender, for it is all give and no take."
-Mahatma Gandhi
https://original.antiwar.com/paul/2021/01/11/the-war-on-terror-comes-home/
"A legislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump's social media accounts wielded "unchecked power," by Twitter and Facebook.
Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU said in a statement that the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices."
https://outline.com/EqrASF
"A group of more than 50 international relations and Middle East experts have signed onto a letter urging President-elect Joe Biden to swiftly return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump had broken with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, replacing it with an economic and military pressure campaign aimed at the Iranian government. The Trump administration insists that the goal is a better deal, although former administration officials say that the true objective was to bring down the Iranian government.
Biden has vowed to return to the nuclear deal, arguing that maximum pressure has failed and returning to the JCPOA is the first step to a wider diplomatic solution with Iran. But he may face serious domestic political obstacles in returning to diplomacy with Iran."
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/01/08/experts-urge-swift-return-to-iran-nuclear-deal/
"Twenty-five civil society organizations have made a joint statement opposing the Senate’s confirmation of Victoria Nuland, said to be nominated by President-elect Joe Biden for the position of undersecretary of state for political affairs."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/10/25-organizations-say-victoria-should-be-rejected/
"Surveying the views of the Biden foreign policy team, one is struck by the extent of utterly conventional thinking."
"Anyone hoping that Joe Biden’s presidency might embrace new thinking on foreign policy and a greater receptivity to the concept of restraint needs to abandon such hopes at this point. Most of the president-elect’s personnel selections for defense and foreign policy posts were members of the Obama administration’s junior varsity. Their undeserved elevation to the varsity team reflects the pervasive attitude within the establishment wing of the Democratic Party that everything was just fine with U.S. foreign policy until the irresponsible, “isolationist” Donald Trump wrecked America’s position in the world. The proper goal, according to that view, is to restore the status quo ante.
But everything was not fine with U.S. foreign policy when Obama left office. Far from it. The administration had launched not one, not two, but three disastrous military interventions—in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—thereby sowing more destruction and chaos throughout the Middle East. Obama and his minions also had further damaged already frayed relations with Russia by supporting demonstrators who overthrew the duly elected, pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Too many of Biden’s announced appointees were proponents of those misadventures."
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/joe-biden%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-dream-team-disappointing-175924
"A January 3 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times advocates that the Biden administration partially lift U.S. government sanctions on Iran to enable Iran to buy Covid vaccines. The op-ed is written by John W. Lambert, a former professor at the U.S. Navy Academy and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran, and Bahman Baktiari, the executive director of the Baskerville Institute.
Why, isn’t that so nice? What a beautiful proposal that is. Why, doesn’t it just perfectly reflect how good and generous the American people are? The authors write, “If the Biden administration works out a COVID deal that facilitates shipments of vaccines to the Iranian people, it will win over the hearts and minds of millions in that country, strengthening the deep but frayed bonds of friendship between ordinary Americans and Iranians.”
What a crock! The U.S. government has been killing Iranians with its evil, illegal, immoral, and illegitimate system of sanctions for decades. And all that Lambert and Baktiari can do is call for a partial lifting of this deadly and destructive act of aggression against the Iranian people?"
https://www.fff.org/2021/01/06/statist-blindness-on-iran/
"Assange became a celebrity at a time when popular interest in these questions was at its zenith in the United States. Eight years of the Bush administration inspired profound concern about the runaway power of the state, especially a new secret state-within-a-state the Bush administration insisted 9/11 gave them the moral mandate to build.
Our invasion of Iraq had been a spectacular failure — unlike pictures of returning coffins, that couldn’t be completely covered up — and Americans learned about grotesque forms of war profiteering. These included the use of mercenaries to whom the taxpayer unknowingly paid lavish sums, to commit horrific war crimes like the Nissour Square Massacre, also known as “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday.”
One of Donald Trump’s most indefensible (and bizarrely, least commented-upon) acts was the pardon of the four Blackwater guards who shot and killed those seventeen Iraqi civilians, including women and children."
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/wednesdays-other-story
"But Baraitser had no problem with the U.S. government prosecuting Assange for practicing journalism.
This is the first time a journalist has been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. Journalists are allowed to publish material illegally obtained by a third person if it is a matter of public concern. The U.S. government has never prosecuted a journalist or newspaper for publishing classified information."
https://truthout.org/articles/assange-extradition-denial-indicts-us-prison-system-but-imperils-journalism/
"Presidents have relied on outdated authorizations for two decades. The president-elect must end this practice."
"Even as America’s military footprint has dramatically expanded across two decades, Congress’s war powers have atrophied for lack of use. America’s founders intended for the act of going to war to be slow, challenging, and deliberate. But with a generous Pentagon budget, limited congressional oversight, and the secretive nature of special operations forces, going to war has never been easier!
Checks on war have eroded not through legal or constitutional changes, but through Congress’s dereliction of duty, with the complicity of the executive branch. The good news is that altering this reality does not require changing law. If President-elect Biden is serious about ending endless wars, leading with diplomacy, and using force only as a last resort, as his foreign-policy platform indicates, he need only end the practice of actively overstepping the bounds of executive authority. Just because Congress will allow it does not mean Biden is obliged to do it."
https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/biden-can-end-the-war-on-terror-on-day-one/
"As we near 20 years of the War on Terror, it’s time for Biden to make good on his promise to end America’s failed military crusades."
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-trump-endless-war/
"The hope is that diplomat William Burns, tapped for CIA director by Joe Biden, will be able to change the culture at Langley and not be subsumed by it."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/12/ray-mcgovern-can-burns-change-the-cia/
If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.
"The message from Biden is clear: The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA’s crimes of torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel. Instead, the organization will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with America’s enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones, someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating war."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/11/john-kiriakou-bidens-nominee-for-cia-director/
"The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone knows it, writes Caity Johnstone."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/09/boot-coming-down-hard-and-fast-on-social-media/
Although it probably won't happen, we can only hope that Trump does the correct thing by pardoning Julian Assange.
"Assange’s supporters had been optimistic about prospects of a pardon from Trump, who has issued contentious clemency grants since losing his reelection bid."
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/with-trump-presidency-winding-down-push-for-assange-pardon-ramps-up-937657.html
"Laws against sedition have historically been used by insecure officials to punish critics."
https://reason.com/2021/01/11/sedition-charges-are-almost-always-a-terrible-idea/
"In the wake of the storming of the Capitol, many people have begun calling to expand the War on Terror. This would be a grave error."
"Reacting to this recent spate of politically motivated violence by granting more powers to policing, however well intentioned, won’t solve anything. Instead, such a move will endow the state—the same state that has gone easy on right-wing, racist violence in the past—with even greater authority, thereby threatening others, including and perhaps especially left-wing, dissenting, immigrant, Black, and Indigenous groups and individuals, if American history is any guide. We don’t need to enlarge the reach of the War on Terror until we all, one way or another, fall under its umbrella. Rather, we should be aiming to end it."
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-domestic-terrorism/
Remember, there are just as many idiots, morons and fools on the Left as there are on the Right--------people all too willing to turn their TV's on and their brains off as they are spoon-fed what to believe and what to think, questioning none of it and then parroting what they hear to all their friends like a bunch of bird-brained automatons. It is unconscionable that some on the Left are cheering their own ultimate oppression as they clap in delight while the State puts us all on the highway to fascism by robbing us of our human right of Free Speech. Use your human rights whether or not they are in violation of man-made laws. Risk it. And ask more questions.
"In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic
As a card carrying member of the ACLU, I proudly support every Amendment of the Bill of Rights including the right to bear arms and especially the First Amendment which is first because it is the most important amendment of them all. I sincerely hope the Conservative Right will sue the pants off Twitter and Amazon and YouTube because I for one will completely support their legal efforts to overturn the push from the tech sector and some quarters of partisan Left to curtail Free Speech. When a private company enters the public sphere, it agrees to a particular compact between its right to do business and the people's right not be discriminated against------so just as it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals or African-Americans so is it also wrong to discriminate against ideologies or those who hold different political viewpoints. Discrimination is wrong, period, no matter who is being discriminated against.
Like it or not, lying and fake news and hate speech are all examples of First Amendment protected Free Speech. Both the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan possess the right to express themselves and their filth freely, like it or not. Any attempt to curtail their speech only results in curtailing the Free Speech of us all. The way to defeat hate speech and fake news and lying is with more speech, a lot more speech against it and by using our critical thinking skills to weigh and decide on our own and never by censorship. Censorship is the highway to fascism. This is why it is extraordinarily ironic that recent calls to censor in the name of stopping fascism is, ironically, the very tool that will actually enable it.
"All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender, for it is all give and no take."
-Mahatma Gandhi
https://original.antiwar.com/paul/2021/01/11/the-war-on-terror-comes-home/
"A legislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump's social media accounts wielded "unchecked power," by Twitter and Facebook.
Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU said in a statement that the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices."
https://outline.com/EqrASF
"A group of more than 50 international relations and Middle East experts have signed onto a letter urging President-elect Joe Biden to swiftly return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump had broken with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, replacing it with an economic and military pressure campaign aimed at the Iranian government. The Trump administration insists that the goal is a better deal, although former administration officials say that the true objective was to bring down the Iranian government.
Biden has vowed to return to the nuclear deal, arguing that maximum pressure has failed and returning to the JCPOA is the first step to a wider diplomatic solution with Iran. But he may face serious domestic political obstacles in returning to diplomacy with Iran."
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/01/08/experts-urge-swift-return-to-iran-nuclear-deal/
"Twenty-five civil society organizations have made a joint statement opposing the Senate’s confirmation of Victoria Nuland, said to be nominated by President-elect Joe Biden for the position of undersecretary of state for political affairs."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/10/25-organizations-say-victoria-should-be-rejected/
"Surveying the views of the Biden foreign policy team, one is struck by the extent of utterly conventional thinking."
"Anyone hoping that Joe Biden’s presidency might embrace new thinking on foreign policy and a greater receptivity to the concept of restraint needs to abandon such hopes at this point. Most of the president-elect’s personnel selections for defense and foreign policy posts were members of the Obama administration’s junior varsity. Their undeserved elevation to the varsity team reflects the pervasive attitude within the establishment wing of the Democratic Party that everything was just fine with U.S. foreign policy until the irresponsible, “isolationist” Donald Trump wrecked America’s position in the world. The proper goal, according to that view, is to restore the status quo ante.
But everything was not fine with U.S. foreign policy when Obama left office. Far from it. The administration had launched not one, not two, but three disastrous military interventions—in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—thereby sowing more destruction and chaos throughout the Middle East. Obama and his minions also had further damaged already frayed relations with Russia by supporting demonstrators who overthrew the duly elected, pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Too many of Biden’s announced appointees were proponents of those misadventures."
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/joe-biden%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-dream-team-disappointing-175924
"A January 3 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times advocates that the Biden administration partially lift U.S. government sanctions on Iran to enable Iran to buy Covid vaccines. The op-ed is written by John W. Lambert, a former professor at the U.S. Navy Academy and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran, and Bahman Baktiari, the executive director of the Baskerville Institute.
Why, isn’t that so nice? What a beautiful proposal that is. Why, doesn’t it just perfectly reflect how good and generous the American people are? The authors write, “If the Biden administration works out a COVID deal that facilitates shipments of vaccines to the Iranian people, it will win over the hearts and minds of millions in that country, strengthening the deep but frayed bonds of friendship between ordinary Americans and Iranians.”
What a crock! The U.S. government has been killing Iranians with its evil, illegal, immoral, and illegitimate system of sanctions for decades. And all that Lambert and Baktiari can do is call for a partial lifting of this deadly and destructive act of aggression against the Iranian people?"
https://www.fff.org/2021/01/06/statist-blindness-on-iran/
"Assange became a celebrity at a time when popular interest in these questions was at its zenith in the United States. Eight years of the Bush administration inspired profound concern about the runaway power of the state, especially a new secret state-within-a-state the Bush administration insisted 9/11 gave them the moral mandate to build.
Our invasion of Iraq had been a spectacular failure — unlike pictures of returning coffins, that couldn’t be completely covered up — and Americans learned about grotesque forms of war profiteering. These included the use of mercenaries to whom the taxpayer unknowingly paid lavish sums, to commit horrific war crimes like the Nissour Square Massacre, also known as “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday.”
One of Donald Trump’s most indefensible (and bizarrely, least commented-upon) acts was the pardon of the four Blackwater guards who shot and killed those seventeen Iraqi civilians, including women and children."
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/wednesdays-other-story
"But Baraitser had no problem with the U.S. government prosecuting Assange for practicing journalism.
This is the first time a journalist has been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. Journalists are allowed to publish material illegally obtained by a third person if it is a matter of public concern. The U.S. government has never prosecuted a journalist or newspaper for publishing classified information."
https://truthout.org/articles/assange-extradition-denial-indicts-us-prison-system-but-imperils-journalism/
"Presidents have relied on outdated authorizations for two decades. The president-elect must end this practice."
"Even as America’s military footprint has dramatically expanded across two decades, Congress’s war powers have atrophied for lack of use. America’s founders intended for the act of going to war to be slow, challenging, and deliberate. But with a generous Pentagon budget, limited congressional oversight, and the secretive nature of special operations forces, going to war has never been easier!
Checks on war have eroded not through legal or constitutional changes, but through Congress’s dereliction of duty, with the complicity of the executive branch. The good news is that altering this reality does not require changing law. If President-elect Biden is serious about ending endless wars, leading with diplomacy, and using force only as a last resort, as his foreign-policy platform indicates, he need only end the practice of actively overstepping the bounds of executive authority. Just because Congress will allow it does not mean Biden is obliged to do it."
https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/biden-can-end-the-war-on-terror-on-day-one/
"As we near 20 years of the War on Terror, it’s time for Biden to make good on his promise to end America’s failed military crusades."
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-trump-endless-war/
"The hope is that diplomat William Burns, tapped for CIA director by Joe Biden, will be able to change the culture at Langley and not be subsumed by it."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/12/ray-mcgovern-can-burns-change-the-cia/
If there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.
"The message from Biden is clear: The CIA will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the CIA’s crimes of torture, secret prisons, or international renditions like Gina Haspel. Instead, the organization will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with America’s enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones, someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating war."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/11/john-kiriakou-bidens-nominee-for-cia-director/
"The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone knows it, writes Caity Johnstone."
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/09/boot-coming-down-hard-and-fast-on-social-media/
Although it probably won't happen, we can only hope that Trump does the correct thing by pardoning Julian Assange.
"Assange’s supporters had been optimistic about prospects of a pardon from Trump, who has issued contentious clemency grants since losing his reelection bid."
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/with-trump-presidency-winding-down-push-for-assange-pardon-ramps-up-937657.html
"Laws against sedition have historically been used by insecure officials to punish critics."
https://reason.com/2021/01/11/sedition-charges-are-almost-always-a-terrible-idea/
"In the wake of the storming of the Capitol, many people have begun calling to expand the War on Terror. This would be a grave error."
"Reacting to this recent spate of politically motivated violence by granting more powers to policing, however well intentioned, won’t solve anything. Instead, such a move will endow the state—the same state that has gone easy on right-wing, racist violence in the past—with even greater authority, thereby threatening others, including and perhaps especially left-wing, dissenting, immigrant, Black, and Indigenous groups and individuals, if American history is any guide. We don’t need to enlarge the reach of the War on Terror until we all, one way or another, fall under its umbrella. Rather, we should be aiming to end it."
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-domestic-terrorism/
Remember, there are just as many idiots, morons and fools on the Left as there are on the Right--------people all too willing to turn their TV's on and their brains off as they are spoon-fed what to believe and what to think, questioning none of it and then parroting what they hear to all their friends like a bunch of bird-brained automatons. It is unconscionable that some on the Left are cheering their own ultimate oppression as they clap in delight while the State puts us all on the highway to fascism by robbing us of our human right of Free Speech. Use your human rights whether or not they are in violation of man-made laws. Risk it. And ask more questions.
"In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic
Comments
Post a Comment